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Publication Abstract from PubMed

Scaffold hopping refers to computer-aided screening for active compounds with different structures against the same receptor to enrich privileged scaffolds, which is a topic of high interest in organic and medicinal chemistry. However, most approaches cannot efficiently predict the potency level of candidates after scaffold hopping. Herein, we identified potent PDE5 inhibitors with a novel scaffold via a free energy perturbation (FEP)-guided scaffold-hopping strategy, and FEP shows great advantages to precisely predict the theoretical binding potencies DeltaG FEP between ligands and their target, which were more consistent with the experimental binding potencies DeltaG EXP (the mean absolute deviations | Delta G FEP - Delta G EXP | < 2 kcal/mol) than those DeltaG MM-PBSA or DeltaG MM-GBSA predicted by the MM-PBSA or MM-GBSA method. Lead L12 had an IC50 of 8.7 nmol/L and exhibited a different binding pattern in its crystal structure with PDE5 from the famous starting drug tadalafil. Our work provides the first report via the FEP-guided scaffold hopping strategy for potent inhibitor discovery with a novel scaffold, implying that it will have a variety of future applications in rational molecular design and drug discovery.

Free energy perturbation (FEP)-guided scaffold hopping.,Wu D, Zheng X, Liu R, Li Z, Jiang Z, Zhou Q, Huang Y, Wu XN, Zhang C, Huang YY, Luo HB Acta Pharm Sin B. 2022 Mar;12(3):1351-1362. doi: 10.1016/j.apsb.2021.09.027. Epub, 2021 Sep 30. PMID:35530128^[1]

From MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.