Kumari Diksha, Palmo Tashi, Mujwar Somdutt, Singh Kuljit
Infectious Diseases Division, CSIR- Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine, Jammu 180001, India; Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR), Ghaziabad 201002, India.
Chitkara College of Pharmacy, Chitkara University, Rajpura 140401, Punjab, India.
Acta Trop. 2024 Dec;260:107473. doi: 10.1016/j.actatropica.2024.107473. Epub 2024 Nov 15.
Leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical disease and is one of the major causes of mortality in poverty-stricken areas. A limited chemotherapeutics arsenal is available to tackle this deadly infection. Thus, identifying novel potent scaffolds using innovative strategies is the need of the hour. High-throughput screening (HTS) is a critical technique that can accelerate the process of drug discovery by evaluating millions of drug-like molecules using various automation tools and biological assays. In the present study, we have employed the HTS strategy to identify potent hits against Leishmania donovani sterol C-24 methyltransferase (LdSMT) from the in-house ChemBridge library. Firstly, a robust dataset was prepared with previously reported sterol C-24 methyltransferase inhibitors, belonging to diverse structural classes. Then, ligand-based virtual screening using similarity search was performed to screen the ChemBridge library having ∼20,000 molecules. This computational approach yielded 81 candidate compounds, which were selected for further molecular docking and biological evaluation. Anti-leishmanial assays revealed that out of 81 molecules, seven showed potential parasitic killing. Three molecules namely IIIM-CB-14, IIIM-CB-29, and IIIM-CB-45 were the most potent ones with 50 % inhibitory concentration (IC) of 5.76, 8.08, and 10.64 µg/mL, respectively. SEM analyses suggest that these potent hits cause considerable morphological alterations. ADME studies of the potent hit molecules indicate that all the hits have considerable drug-likeness properties. Further, molecular dynamics studies were also performed to check the stable confirmation of LdSMT protein with the top two hits (IIIM-CB-14 and IIIM-CB-45). Thus, the present study harnesses computational and experimental approaches to unravel potent anti-leishmanial scaffolds.
利什曼病是一种被忽视的热带疾病,是贫困地区主要的致死原因之一。目前用于应对这种致命感染的化疗药物有限。因此,利用创新策略识别新型有效药物骨架是当务之急。高通量筛选(HTS)是一项关键技术,它可以通过使用各种自动化工具和生物测定法评估数百万种类药物分子来加速药物发现过程。在本研究中,我们采用高通量筛选策略从内部ChemBridge库中识别针对杜氏利什曼原虫甾醇C-24甲基转移酶(LdSMT)的有效活性分子。首先,利用先前报道的属于不同结构类别的甾醇C-24甲基转移酶抑制剂构建了一个可靠的数据集。然后,使用相似性搜索进行基于配体的虚拟筛选,以筛选拥有约20,000个分子的ChemBridge库。这种计算方法产生了81种候选化合物,这些化合物被选用于进一步的分子对接和生物学评估。抗利什曼原虫试验表明,在81个分子中,有7个显示出潜在的杀寄生虫作用。三种分子,即IIIM-CB-14、IIIM-CB-29和IIIM-CB-45是最有效的,其50%抑制浓度(IC)分别为5.76、8.08和10.64µg/mL。扫描电子显微镜(SEM)分析表明,这些有效活性分子会引起相当大的形态学改变。对有效活性分子的药物代谢动力学(ADME)研究表明,所有活性分子都具有相当的类药物性质。此外,还进行了分子动力学研究,以检查LdSMT蛋白与前两个活性分子(IIIM-CB-14和IIIM-CB-45)的稳定构象。因此,本研究利用计算和实验方法来揭示有效的抗利什曼原虫药物骨架。