Rottlerin is a pan phosphodiesterase inhibitor and can induce neurodifferentiation in IMR-32 human neuroblastoma cells.

Phosphodiesterases are promising targets for pharmacological intervention against various diseases. There are already inhibitors of PDE3, PDE4 and PDE5 as approved drugs. However there is an unmet need to discover new chemical scaffolds as PDE inhibitors. The main drawback of most of PDE inhibitors is their non specificity; owing to their structural resemblance to cAMP or cGMP. Natural product compounds offer high structural diversity hence may provide new PDE inhibitors. We decided to screen our institutional natural product compound library of nearly 900 molecules for PDE5 inhibition and explore the selectivity against PDE1-11 and cytotoxicity of the hit molecule/s. Rottlerin was identified as a PDE5 inhibitor. It was found to inhibit other PDEs with varying specificities. Structure activity relationship data and molecular dynamics studies showed that Tyr612, Asp764, Gln817 and Phe820 in the binding pocket of PDE5 play an important role in the activity of rottlerin. As a pan PDE inhibitor, rottlerin was also found to activate the AMPK pathway and induce neurodifferentiation in IMR-32 cells, with the effect more efficient in samples co-treated with cAMP activator Forskolin. Rottlerin at higher concentrations was shown to induce autophagy, apoptosis and G2/S cell cycle arrest in IMR-32 cells.