Discovery of 2-Amino-7-sulfonyl-7H-pyrrolo[2,3-d]pyrimidine Derivatives as Potent Reversible FGFR Inhibitors with Gatekeeper Mutation Tolerance: Design, Synthesis, and Biological Evaluation

Current scenario of fused pyrimidines with in vivo anticancer therapeutic potential

Cancer, characterized by uncontrolled cell growth and metastasis, is responsible for nearly one in six deaths and represents a severe threat to public health worldwide. Chemotherapy can substantially improve the quality of life and survival of patients with cancer, but anticancer chemotherapeutics are associated with a range of adverse effects. Moreover, almost all currently available anticancer chemotherapeutics could develop drug resistance over a period of time of application in cancer patients and ultimately lead to cancer relapse and death in 90% of patients, creating an urgent need to develop new anticancer agents. Fused pyrimidines trait the inextricable part of DNA and RNA and are vital in numerous biological processes. Fused pyrimidines can act on various biological cancer targets and have the potential to address drug resistance. In addition, more than 20 fused pyrimidines have already been approved for clinical treatment of different cancers and occupy a prominent place in the current therapeutic arsenal, revealing that fused pyrimidines are privileged scaffolds for the development of novel anticancer chemotherapeutics. The purpose of this review is to summarize the current scenario of fused pyrimidines with in vivo anticancer therapeutic potential along with their acute toxicity, metabolic profiles as well as pharmacokinetic properties, toxicity and mechanisms of action developed from 2020 to the present to facilitate further rational exploitation of more effective candidates.

KinomeMETA: meta-learning enhanced kinome-wide polypharmacology profiling

Kinase inhibitors are crucial in cancer treatment, but drug resistance and side effects hinder the development of effective drugs. To address these challenges, it is essential to analyze the polypharmacology of kinase inhibitor and identify compound with high selectivity profile. This study presents KinomeMETA, a framework for profiling the activity of small molecule kinase inhibitors across a panel of 661 kinases. By training a meta-learner based on a graph neural network and fine-tuning it to create kinase-specific learners, KinomeMETA outperforms benchmark multi-task models and other kinase profiling models. It provides higher accuracy for understudied kinases with limited known data and broader coverage of kinase types, including important mutant kinases. Case studies on the discovery of new scaffold inhibitors for membrane-associated tyrosine- and threonine-specific cdc2-inhibitory kinase and selective inhibitors for fibroblast growth factor receptors demonstrate the role of KinomeMETA in virtual screening and kinome-wide activity profiling. Overall, KinomeMETA has the potential to accelerate kinase drug discovery by more effectively exploring the kinase polypharmacology landscape.

Design, synthesis and biological evaluation of indazole derivatives as selective covalent inhibitors of FGFR4 in wild-type and gatekeeper mutants

Fibroblast growth factor receptor 4 (FGFR4) has been proved to be an effective target for cancer therapy. Aberration in FGF19/FGFR4 signaling is oncogenic driving force in human hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). FGFR4 gatekeeper mutations induced acquired resistance remains an unmet clinical challenge for HCC treatment. In this study, a series of 1H-indazole derivatives were designed and synthesized as new irreversible inhibitors of wild-type and gatekeeper mutant FGFR4. These new derivatives showed significant FGFR4 inhibitory and antitumor activities, among which compound 27i was demonstrated to be the most potent compound (FGFR4 IC₅₀ = 2.4 nM). Remarkably, compound 27i exhibited no activity against a panel of 381 kinases at 1 μM. Additionally, compound 27i displayed nanomolar IC₅₀s against huh7 (IC₅₀ = 21 nM) and two mutant cell lines, BaF3/ETV6-FGFR4-V550L and BaF3/ETV6-FGFR4-N535K (IC₅₀ = 2.5/171 nM). Meanwhile, compound 27i exhibited potent antitumor potency (TGI: 83.0%, 40 mg/kg, BID) in Huh7 xenograft mouse models with no obvious toxicity observed. Overall, compound 27i was identified as a promising preclinical candidate for overcoming FGFR4 gatekeeper mutations for HCC treatment.

Light-mediated sulfonyl-iodination of ynamides and internal alkynes

We synthesized tetrasubstituted olefins regioselectively and stereoselectively from ynamides and internal alkynes with sulfonyl iodides under blue LEDs in few minutes. The key features are being metal-free, easy to handle, simple, broad in scope, and environmentally friendly. Furthermore, a gram-scale experiment was conducted, and the synthesized corresponding sulfonyl-iodinated products were smoothly altered into various other products.

Recent Advances in Synthetic Routes to Azacycles

A heterocycle is an important structural scaffold of many organic compounds found in pharmaceuticals, materials, agrochemicals, and biological processes. Azacycles are one of the most common motifs of a heterocycle and have a variety of applications, including in pharmaceuticals. Therefore, azacycles have received significant attention from scientists and a variety of methods of synthesizing azacycles have been developed because their efficient synthesis plays a vital role in the production of many useful compounds. In this review, we summarize recent approaches to preparing azacycles via different methods as well as describe plausible reaction mechanisms.