Scaffold diversity of natural products: inspiration for combinatorial library design

Cancer wars: natural products strike back

Natural products have historically been a mainstay source of anticancer drugs, but in the 90's they fell out of favor in pharmaceutical companies with the emergence of targeted therapies, which rely on antibodies or small synthetic molecules identified by high throughput screening. Although targeted therapies greatly improved the treatment of a few cancers, the benefit has remained disappointing for many solid tumors, which revitalized the interest in natural products. With the approval of rapamycin in 2007, 12 novel natural product derivatives have been brought to market. The present review describes the discovery and development of these new anticancer drugs and highlights the peculiarities of natural product and new trends in this exciting field of drug discovery.

Discovery of new heterocycles with activity against human neutrophile elastase based on a boron promoted one-pot assembly reaction

Herein we demonstrate for the first time that a boron promoted one-pot assembly reaction may be used to discover novel enzyme inhibitors. Inhibitors for HNE were simply assembled in excellent yields, high diastereoselectivities and IC50 up to 1.10 μM, based on components like salicylaldehyde, aryl boronic acids and amino acids. The combination of synthetic, biochemical, analytical and theoretical studies allowed the identification of the 4-methoxy or the 4-diethyl amino substituent of the salicylaldehyde as the most important recognition moiety and the imine alkylation, lactone ring opening as key events in the mechanism of inhibition.

The uniqueness and therapeutic value of natural products from West African medicinal plants, part II: terpenoids, geographical distribution and drug discovery

In this review series, an attempt has been made to give indepth coverage of natural products derived from West African medicinal plants with diverse biological activities.

Natural products that inhibit carbonic anhydrase

The chemical diversity, binding specificity and propensity to interact with biological targets has inspired many researchers to utilize natural products as molecular probes. Almost all reported carbonic anhydrase inhibitors comprise a zinc binding group in their structure of which the primary sulfonamide moiety (-SO2NH2) is the foremost example and to a lesser extent the primary sulfamate (-O-SO2NH2) and sulfamide (-NH-SO2NH2) groups. Natural products that comprise these zinc binding groups in their structure are however rare and relatively few natural products have been explored as a source for novel carbonic anhydrase inhibitors. This chapter will highlight the recent and growing interest in carbonic anhydrase inhibitors sourced from nature, demonstrating that natural product chemical space presents a rich source of potential alternate chemotypes for the discovery of novel drug-like carbonic anhydrase inhibitors.

New antimalarial hits from Dacryodes edulis (Burseraceae)--part I: isolation, in vitro activity, in silico "drug-likeness" and pharmacokinetic profiles

The aims of the present study were to identify the compounds responsible for the anti-malarial activity of Dacryoedes edulis (Burseraceae) and to investigate their suitability as leads for the treatment of drug resistant malaria. Five compounds were isolated from ethyl acetate and hexane extracts of D. edulis stem bark and tested against 3D7 (chloroquine-susceptible) and Dd2 (multidrug-resistant) strains of Plasmodium falciparum, using the parasite lactate dehydrogenase method. Cytotoxicity studies were carried out on LLC-MK2 monkey kidney epithelial cell-line. In silico analysis was conducted by calculating molecular descriptors using the MOE software running on a Linux workstation. The “drug-likeness” of the isolated compounds was assessed using Lipinski criteria, from computed molecular properties of the geometry optimized structures. Computed descriptors often used to predict absorption, distribution, metabolism, elimination and toxicity (ADMET) were used to assess the pharmacokinetic profiles of the isolated compounds. Antiplasmodial activity was demonstrated for the first time in five major natural products previously identified in D. edulis, but not tested against malaria parasites. The most active compound identified was termed DES4. It had IC₅₀ values of 0.37 and 0.55 µg/mL, against 3D7 and Dd2 respectively. In addition, this compound was shown to act in synergy with quinine, satisfied all criteria of “Drug-likeness” and showed considerable probability of providing an antimalarial lead. The remaining four compounds also showed antiplasmodial activity, but were less effective than DES4. None of the tested compounds was cytotoxicity against LLC-MK2 cells, suggesting their selective activities on malaria parasites. Based on the high in vitro activity, low toxicity and predicted “Drug-likeness” DES4 merits further investigation as a possible drug lead for the treatment of malaria.

AfroDb: a select highly potent and diverse natural product library from African medicinal plants

Computer-aided drug design (CADD) often involves virtual screening (VS) of large compound datasets and the availability of such is vital for drug discovery protocols. We assess the bioactivity and "drug-likeness" of a relatively small but structurally diverse dataset (containing >1,000 compounds) from African medicinal plants, which have been tested and proven a wide range of biological activities. The geographical regions of collection of the medicinal plants cover the entire continent of Africa, based on data from literature sources and information from traditional healers. For each isolated compound, the three dimensional (3D) structure has been used to calculate physico-chemical properties used in the prediction of oral bioavailability on the basis of Lipinski's "Rule of Five". A comparative analysis has been carried out with the "drug-like", "lead-like", and "fragment-like" subsets, as well as with the Dictionary of Natural Products. A diversity analysis has been carried out in comparison with the ChemBridge diverse database. Furthermore, descriptors related to absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicity (ADMET) have been used to predict the pharmacokinetic profile of the compounds within the dataset. Our results prove that drug discovery, beginning with natural products from the African flora, could be highly promising. The 3D structures are available and could be useful for virtual screening and natural product lead generation programs.

Assessing the pharmacokinetic profile of the CamMedNP natural products database: an in silico approach

Background

Drug metabolism and pharmacokinetic (DMPK) assessment has come to occupy a place of interest during the early stages of drug discovery today. Computer-based methods are slowly gaining ground in this area and are often used as initial tools to eliminate compounds likely to present uninteresting pharmacokinetic profiles and unacceptable levels of toxicity from the list of potential drug candidates, hence cutting down the cost of the discovery of a drug.

Results

In the present study, we present an in silico assessment of the DMPK profile of our recently published natural products database of 1,859 unique compounds derived from 224 species of medicinal plants from the Cameroonian forest. In this analysis, we have used 46 computed physico-chemical properties or molecular descriptors to predict the absorption, distribution, metabolism and elimination (ADME) of the compounds. This survey demonstrated that about 50% of the compounds within the Cameroonian medicinal plant and natural products (CamMedNP) database are compliant, having properties which fall within the range of ADME properties of >95% of currently known drugs, while >73% of the compounds have ≤2 violations. Moreover, about 72% of the compounds within the corresponding ‘drug-like’ subset showed compliance.

Conclusions

In addition to the previously verified levels of ‘drug-likeness’ and the diversity and the wide range of measured biological activities, the compounds in the CamMedNP database show interesting DMPK profiles and, hence, could represent an important starting point for hit/lead discovery from medicinal plants in Africa.

In silico drug metabolism and pharmacokinetic profiles of natural products from medicinal plants in the Congo basin

Purpose

Drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics (DMPK) assessment has come to occupy a place of interest during the early stages of drug discovery today. The use of computer modelling to predict the DMPK and toxicity properties of a natural product library derived from medicinal plants from Central Africa (named ConMedNP). Material from some of the plant sources are currently employed in African Traditional Medicine.

Methods

Computer-based methods are slowly gaining ground in this area and are often used as preliminary criteria for the elimination of compounds likely to present uninteresting pharmacokinetic profiles and unacceptable levels of toxicity from the list of potential drug candidates, hence cutting down the cost of discovery of a drug.

In the present study, we present an in silico assessment of the DMPK and toxicity profile of a natural product library containing ~3,200 compounds, derived from 379 species of medicinal plants from 10 countries in the Congo Basin forests and savannas, which have been published in the literature. In this analysis, we have used 46 computed physico-chemical properties or molecular descriptors to predict the absorption, distribution, metabolism and elimination and toxicity (ADMET) of the compounds.

Results

This survey demonstrated that about 45% of the compounds within the ConMedNP compound library are compliant, having properties which fall within the range of ADME properties of 95% of currently known drugs, while about 69% of the compounds have ≤ 2 violations. Moreover, about 73% of the compounds within the corresponding “drug-like” subset showed compliance.

Conclusions

In addition to the verified levels of “drug-likeness”, diversity and the wide range of measured biological activities, the compounds from medicinal plants in Central Africa show interesting DMPK profiles and hence could represent an important starting point for hit/lead discovery.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/2193-9616-1-12) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Use of natural products as chemical library for drug discovery and network pharmacology

BACKGROUND

Natural products have been an important source of lead compounds for drug discovery. How to find and evaluate bioactive natural products is critical to the achievement of drug/lead discovery from natural products.

METHODOLOGY

We collected 19,7201 natural products structures, reported biological activities and virtual screening results. Principal component analysis was employed to explore the chemical space, and we found that there was a large portion of overlap between natural products and FDA-approved drugs in the chemical space, which indicated that natural products had large quantity of potential lead compounds. We also explored the network properties of natural product-target networks and found that polypharmacology was greatly enriched to those compounds with large degree and high betweenness centrality. In order to make up for a lack of experimental data, high throughput virtual screening was employed. All natural products were docked to 332 target proteins of FDA-approved drugs. The most potential natural products for drug discovery and their indications were predicted based on a docking score-weighted prediction model.

CONCLUSIONS

Analysis of molecular descriptors, distribution in chemical space and biological activities of natural products was conducted in this article. Natural products have vast chemical diversity, good drug-like properties and can interact with multiple cellular target proteins.

Finding novel pharmaceuticals in the systems biology era using multiple effective drug targets, phenotypic screening and knowledge of transporters: where drug discovery went wrong and how to fix it

Despite the sequencing of the human genome, the rate of innovative and successful drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry has continued to decrease. Leaving aside regulatory matters, the fundamental and interlinked intellectual issues proposed to be largely responsible for this are: (a) the move from 'function-first' to 'target-first' methods of screening and drug discovery; (b) the belief that successful drugs should and do interact solely with single, individual targets, despite natural evolution's selection for biochemical networks that are robust to individual parameter changes; (c) an over-reliance on the rule-of-5 to constrain biophysical and chemical properties of drug libraries; (d) the general abandoning of natural products that do not obey the rule-of-5; (e) an incorrect belief that drugs diffuse passively into (and presumably out of) cells across the bilayers portions of membranes, according to their lipophilicity; (f) a widespread failure to recognize the overwhelmingly important role of proteinaceous transporters, as well as their expression profiles, in determining drug distribution in and between different tissues and individual patients; and (g) the general failure to use engineering principles to model biology in parallel with performing 'wet' experiments, such that 'what if?' experiments can be performed in silico to assess the likely success of any strategy. These facts/ideas are illustrated with a reasonably extensive literature review. Success in turning round drug discovery consequently requires: (a) decent systems biology models of human biochemical networks; (b) the use of these (iteratively with experiments) to model how drugs need to interact with multiple targets to have substantive effects on the phenotype; (c) the adoption of polypharmacology and/or cocktails of drugs as a desirable goal in itself; (d) the incorporation of drug transporters into systems biology models, en route to full and multiscale systems biology models that incorporate drug absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion; (e) a return to 'function-first' or phenotypic screening; and (f) novel methods for inferring modes of action by measuring the properties on system variables at all levels of the 'omes. Such a strategy offers the opportunity of achieving a state where we can hope to predict biological processes and the effect of pharmaceutical agents upon them. Consequently, this should both lower attrition rates and raise the rates of discovery of effective drugs substantially.

Druggable chemical space and enumerative combinatorics

BACKGROUND

There is a growing body of literature describing the properties of marketed drugs, the concept of drug-likeness and the vastness of chemical space. In that context, enumerative combinatorics with simple atomic components may be useful in the conception and design of structurally novel compounds for expanding and enhancing high-throughput screening (HTS) libraries.

RESULTS

A random combination of mono- and diatomic carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen containing components in the absence of molecular weight constraints but with the ability to form rings affords virtual compounds that fall in bulk physicochemical space typically associated with drugs, but whose ring assemblies fall in new or under-represented areas of chemical shape space. When compared against compounds in the ChEMBL_14, MDDR, Drug Bank and Dictionary of Natural Products, the percentage of virtual compounds with a Tanimoto index of 1.0 (ECFP_4) was found to be as high as 0.21. Depending on therapeutic target, this value may be in range of what might be expected from an experimental HTS campaign in terms of a true hit rate.

CONCLUSION

Virtual compounds derived through enumerative combinatorics of simple atomic components have drug-like properties with ring assemblies that fall in new or under-represented areas of shape space. Structures derived in this manner could provide the starting point or inspiration for the design of structurally novel scaffolds in an unbiased fashion.

Oxygen-containing fragments in natural products

An analysis of the chemical environment of the oxygen atoms in the DNP database compared to the CMC and SCD databases was performed. Some structural clusters were identified which are predominant among the natural products and can be considered as distinctive features of NPs. Fifty-three oxygen-containing structural fragments that are distinctive for the DNP (distinctive set of fragments DSF) in comparison with the SCD have been identified. A new descriptor Mc was introduced for describing the ratio of atoms involved in the DSF to the total number of heavy atoms. A significant difference in the Mc values among the reference databases allowed the use of a specific cluster of the DSF as a tool for performing similarity searches for oxygen-containing NP molecules, or for evaluation or comparison of databases according to their NP-likeness. An example illustrating that the suggested approach could allow not only estimating the NP-likeness, but also serve as a tool for designing new NP-like compounds is provided. The suggested approach for NP-likeness evaluation moves away from the traditional ideas of scaffolds, cycles, linkers and substituents.

Structural and functional characterization of the bacterial translocation inhibitor GE82832

The structure of GE82832, a translocation inhibitor produced by a soil microorganism, is shown to be highly related to that of dityromycin, a bicyclodecadepsipeptide antibiotic discovered long ago whose characterization had never been pursued beyond its structural elucidation. GE82832 and dityromycin were shown to interfere with both aminoacyl-tRNA and mRNA movement and with the Pi release occurring after ribosome- and EF-G-dependent GTP hydrolysis. These findings and the unusual ribosomal localization of GE82832/dityromycin near protein S13 suggest that the mechanism of inhibition entails an interference with the rotation of the 30S subunit "head" which accompanies the ribosome-unlocking step of translocation.

Rapid and efficient access to secondary arylmethylamines

Ammoniomethyl trifluoroborates are very powerful reagents that can be used to access biologically relevant aryl- and heteroaryl-methylamine motifs via Suzuki-Miyaura cross-couplings. Until now, this method was limited to the production of tertiary and primary amines. The synthesis of a large array of secondary ammoniomethyltrifluoroborates has been achieved through a one step nucleophilic substitution reaction on the potassium bromomethyltrifluoroborate. Smooth cross-coupling conditions have been designed, based on the use of an aminobiphenyl palladium precatalyst, to couple these trifluoroborates efficiently with aryl bromides. This strategy offers a new way to access biologically relevant motifs and allows, with the previously developed methods, access to all three classes of aminomethylarenes.

Four-component assembly of chiral N-B heterocycles with a natural product-like framework

The dative N-B bond was used to simply assemble heterocycles with a skeleton akin to the 5-oxofuro[2,3-b]furan motif. Twenty-five new N-B heterocycles were prepared via a highly efficient one-pot four-component reaction in yields and diastereoselectivities up to 95% and >97%, respectively. Several reaction intermediates were discovered using electrospray ionization mass spectroscopy which set the basis for the mechanism elucidation using DFT calculations.

Scaffold diversity of exemplified medicinal chemistry space

The scaffold diversity of 7 representative commercial and proprietary compound libraries is explored for the first time using both Murcko frameworks and Scaffold Trees. We show that Level 1 of the Scaffold Tree is useful for the characterization of scaffold diversity in compound libraries and offers advantages over the use of Murcko frameworks. This analysis also demonstrates that the majority of compounds in the libraries we analyzed contain only a small number of well represented scaffolds and that a high percentage of singleton scaffolds represent the remaining compounds. We use Tree Maps to clearly visualize the scaffold space of representative compound libraries, for example, to display highly populated scaffolds and clusters of structurally similar scaffolds. This study further highlights the need for diversification of compound libraries used in hit discovery by focusing library enrichment on the synthesis of compounds with novel or underrepresented scaffolds.

Rule-Based Classification of Chemical Structures by Scaffold

Databases for small organic chemical molecules usually contain millions of structures. The screening decks of pharmaceutical companies contain more than a million of structures. Nevertheless chemical substructure searching in these databases can be performed interactively in seconds. Because of this nobody has really missed structural classification of these databases for the purpose of finding data for individual chemical substructures. However, a full deck high-throughput screen produces also activity data for more than a million of substances. How can this amount of data be analyzed? Which are the active scaffolds identified by an assays? To answer such questions systematic classifications of molecules by scaffolds are needed. In this review it is described how molecules can be hierarchically classified by their scaffolds. It is explained how such classifications can be used to identify active scaffolds in an HTS data set. Once active classes are identified, they need to be visualized in the context of related scaffolds in order to understand SAR. Consequently such visualizations are another topic of this review. In addition scaffold based diversity measures are discussed and an outlook is given about the potential impact of structural classifications on a chemically aware semantic web.

Mining for bioactive scaffolds with scaffold networks: improved compound set enrichment from primary screening data

Identification of meaningful chemical patterns in the increasing amounts of high-throughput-generated bioactivity data available today is an increasingly important challenge for successful drug discovery. Herein, we present the scaffold network as a novel approach for mapping and navigation of chemical and biological space. A scaffold network represents the chemical space of a library of molecules consisting of all molecular scaffolds and smaller "parent" scaffolds generated therefrom by the pruning of rings, effectively leading to a network of common scaffold substructure relationships. This algorithm provides an extension of the scaffold tree algorithm that, instead of a network, generates a tree relationship between a heuristically rule-based selected subset of parent scaffolds. The approach was evaluated for the identification of statistically significantly active scaffolds from primary screening data for which the scaffold tree approach has already been shown to be successful. Because of the exhaustive enumeration of smaller scaffolds and the full enumeration of relationships between them, about twice as many statistically significantly active scaffolds were identified compared to the scaffold-tree-based approach. We suggest visualizing scaffold networks as islands of active scaffolds.

Modern natural products drug discovery and its relevance to biodiversity conservation

Natural products continue to provide a diverse and unique source of bioactive lead compounds for drug discovery, but maintaining their continued eminence as source compounds is challenging in the face of the changing face of the pharmaceutical industry and the changing nature of biodiversity prospecting brought about by the Convention on Biological Diversity. This review provides an overview of some of these challenges and suggests ways in which they can be addressed so that natural products research can remain a viable and productive route to drug discovery. Results from International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBGs) working in Madagascar, Panama, and Suriname are used as examples of what can be achieved when biodiversity conservation is linked to drug discovery.

Immunosuppressive polyketides from mantis-associated Daldinia eschscholzii

Polyketides with unknown architectures are highly desired for the discovery of new drugs and agrochemicals. Here, the mantis-associated Daldinia eschscholzii, a fungus known to produce immunosuppressants dalesconols A and B, was found to simultaneously generate four novel skeletons capable of shaping the unusual chemistry of the fungal polyketides, of which seven were structurally unique and substantially immunosuppressive. In particular, the scaled-up fermentation of the microbe enabled the structural characterization of minor or "transitional" intermediate polyketides that allowed the reasonable recognition of the four biosynthetic pathways initiated by condensations of four, five, six and eight acetate units, respectively. Furthermore, the decarbonylation reaction of triketone, as in the case of daeschol A, was described for the first time, in addition to the structural correction of sporothrin C and nodulone. The work provided a set of novel immunosuppressive molecules that are of significance to drug discovery.

A call for using natural compounds in the development of new antimalarial treatments - an introduction

Natural compounds, mostly from plants, have been the mainstay of traditional medicine for thousands of years. They have also been the source of lead compounds for modern medicine, but the extent of mining of natural compounds for such leads decreased during the second half of the 20^th century. The advantage of natural compounds for the development of drugs derives from their innate affinity for biological receptors. Natural compounds have provided the best anti-malarials known to date. Recent surveys have identified many extracts of various organisms (mostly plants) as having antiplasmodial activity. Huge libraries of fractionated natural compounds have been screened with impressive hit rates. Importantly, many cases are known where the crude biological extract is more efficient pharmacologically than the most active purified compound from this extract. This could be due to synergism with other compounds present in the extract, that as such have no pharmacological activity. Indeed, such compounds are best screened by cell-based assay where all potential targets in the cell are probed and possible synergies identified. Traditional medicine uses crude extracts. These have often been shown to provide many concoctions that deal better with the overall disease condition than with the causative agent itself. Traditional medicines are used by ~80 % of Africans as a first response to ailment. Many of the traditional medicines have demonstrable anti-plasmodial activities. It is suggested that rigorous evaluation of traditional medicines involving controlled clinical trials in parallel with agronomical development for more reproducible levels of active compounds could improve the availability of drugs at an acceptable cost and a source of income in malaria endemic countries.

Chemoinformatics and library design

This chapter provides a brief overview of chemoinformatics and its applications to chemical library design. It is meant to be a quick starter and to serve as an invitation to readers for more in-depth exploration of the field. The topics covered in this chapter are chemical representation, chemical data and data mining, molecular descriptors, chemical space and dimension reduction, quantitative structure-activity relationship, similarity, diversity, and multiobjective optimization.

Chemoselective enrichment for natural products discovery

Natural products account for a significant proportion of modern day therapeutic agents. However, the discovery of novel compounds is hindered by the isolation process, which often relies upon extraction and chromatographic separation techniques. These methods, which are dependent upon the physicochemical properties of the compounds, have a limited ability to both purify and concentrate the minor components of a biological extract. We have devised an isolation strategy based upon an orthogonal chemical feature, namely, functional group composition. Development of a functional group-targeted method is expected to achieve exceptional resolution given the large number of distinct moieties present in natural product extracts. Here, we describe the generation of controllably reversible covalent enrichment tags for the chemoselective isolation of alcohol-containing natural products from complex mixtures.