Identification of a cell-active chikungunya virus nsP2 protease inhibitor using a covalent fragment-based screening approach.

Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) is a mosquito-borne alphavirus that has been responsible for numerous large-scale outbreaks in the last twenty years. Currently, there are no FDA-approved therapeutics for any alphavirus infection. CHIKV nonstructural protein 2 (nsP2), which contains a cysteine protease domain, is essential for viral replication, making it an attractive target for a drug discovery campaign. Here, we optimized a CHIKV nsP2 protease (nsP2pro) biochemical assay for the screening of a 6,120-compound cysteine-directed covalent fragment library. Using a 50% inhibition threshold, we identified 153 hits (2.5% hit rate). In dose-response follow-up, RA-0002034, a covalent fragment that contains a vinyl sulfone warhead, inhibited CHIKV nsP2pro with an IC50 of 58 ± 17 nM, and further analysis with time-dependent inhibition studies yielded a kinact /KI of 6.4 × 103 M-1s-1. LC-MS/MS analysis determined that RA-0002034 covalently modified the catalytic cysteine in a site-specific manner. Additionally, RA-0002034 showed no significant off-target reactivity in proteomic experiments or against a panel of cysteine proteases. In addition to the potent biochemical inhibition of CHIKV nsP2pro activity and exceptional selectivity, RA-0002034 was tested in cellular models of alphavirus infection and effectively inhibited viral replication of both CHIKV and related alphaviruses. This study highlights the identification and characterization of the chemical probe RA-0002034 as a promising hit compound from covalent fragment-based screening for development toward a CHIKV or pan-alphavirus therapeutic.

Structure Activity of ß-Amidomethyl Vinyl Sulfones as Covalent Inhibitors of Chikungunya nsP2 Cysteine Protease with Antialphavirus Activity.

Despite their widespread impact on human health, there are no approved drugs for combating alphavirus infections. The heterocyclic ß-aminomethyl vinyl sulfone RA-0002034 (1a) is a potent irreversible covalent inhibitor of the alphavirus nsP2 cysteine protease with broad-spectrum antiviral activity. Analogs of 1a that varied each of the three regions of the molecule were synthesized to establish structure-activity relationships for the inhibition of Chikungunya (CHIKV) nsP2 protease and viral replication. The vinyl sulfone covalent warhead was highly sensitive to modifications. However, alterations to the core five-membered heterocycle and aryl substituent were well tolerated. The 5-(2,5-dimethoxyphenyl)pyrazole (1o) and 4-cyanopyrazole (8d) analogs exhibited kinact/Ki ratios >9000 M-1 s-1. 3-Arylisoxazole (10) was identified as an isosteric replacement for the five-membered heterocycle, which circumvented the intramolecular cyclization of pyrazole-based inhibitors like 1a. A ligand-based model of the enzyme active site was developed to aid the design of nsP2 protease inhibitors as potential therapeutics against alphaviruses.

Structure Activity of ß-Amidomethyl Vinyl Sulfones as Covalent Inhibitors of Chikungunya nsP2 Cysteine Protease with Anti-alphavirus Activity.

Despite their widespread impact on human health there are no approved drugs for combating alphavirus infections. The heterocyclic ß-aminomethyl vinyl sulfone RA-0002034 (1a) is a potent irreversible covalent inhibitor of the alphavirus nsP2 cysteine protease with broad spectrum antiviral activity. Analogs of 1a that varied each of three regions of the molecule were synthesized to establish structure-activity relationships for inhibition of Chikungunya (CHIKV) nsP2 protease and viral replication. The covalent warhead was highly sensitive to modifications of the sulfone or vinyl substituents. However, numerous alterations to the core 5-membered heterocycle and its aryl substituent were well tolerated and several analogs were identified that enhanced CHIKV nsP2 binding. For example, the 4-cyanopyrazole analog 8d exhibited a kinact /Ki ratio >10,000 M-1s-1. 3-Arylisoxazole was identified an isosteric replacement for the 5-membered heterocycle, which circumvented the intramolecular cyclization that complicated the synthesis of pyrazole-based inhibitors like 1a. The accumulated structure-activity data was used to build a ligand-based model of the enzyme active site, which can be used to guide the design of covalent nsP2 protease inhibitors as potential therapeutics against alphaviruses.

STOPLIGHT: A Hit Scoring Calculator.

We introduce STOPLIGHT, a web portal to assist medicinal chemists in prioritizing hits from screening campaigns and the selection of compounds for optimization. STOPLIGHT incorporates services to assess 6 physiochemical and structural properties, 6 assay liabilities, and 11 pharmacokinetic properties, for any small molecule represented by its SMILES string. We briefly describe each service and illustrate the utility of this portal with a case study. The STOPLIGHT portal provides a user-friendly tool to guide hit selection in early drug discovery campaigns, whereby compounds with unfavorable properties can be quickly recognized and eliminated.

Pharmacokinetics Profiler (PhaKinPro): Model Development, Validation, and Implementation as a Web Tool for Triaging Compounds with Undesired Pharmacokinetics Profiles.

Computational models that predict pharmacokinetic properties are critical to deprioritize drug candidates that emerge as hits in high-throughput screening campaigns. We collected, curated, and integrated a database of compounds tested in 12 major end points comprising over 10,000 unique molecules. We then employed these data to build and validate binary quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) models. All trained models achieved a correct classification rate above 0.60 and a positive predictive value above 0.50. To illustrate their utility in drug discovery, we used these models to predict the pharmacokinetic properties for drugs in the NCATS Inxight Drugs database. In addition, we employed the developed models to predict the pharmacokinetic properties of all compounds in the DrugBank. All models described in this paper have been integrated and made publicly available via the PhaKinPro Web-portal that can be accessed at https://phakinpro.mml.unc.edu/.

Utilizing Low-Dimensional Molecular Embeddings for Rapid Chemical Similarity Search.

Nearest neighbor-based similarity searching is a common task in chemistry, with notable use cases in drug discovery. Yet, some of the most commonly used approaches for this task still leverage a brute-force approach. In practice this can be computationally costly and overly time-consuming, due in part to the sheer size of modern chemical databases. Previous computational advancements for this task have generally relied on improvements to hardware or dataset-specific tricks that lack generalizability. Approaches that leverage lower-complexity searching algorithms remain relatively underexplored. However, many of these algorithms are approximate solutions and/or struggle with typical high-dimensional chemical embeddings. Here we evaluate whether a combination of low-dimensional chemical embeddings and a k-d tree data structure can achieve fast nearest neighbor queries while maintaining performance on standard chemical similarity search benchmarks. We examine different dimensionality reductions of standard chemical embeddings as well as a learned, structurally-aware embedding-SmallSA-for this task. With this framework, searches on over one billion chemicals execute in less than a second on a single CPU core, five orders of magnitude faster than the brute-force approach. We also demonstrate that SmallSA achieves competitive performance on chemical similarity benchmarks.

An Improved Metric and Benchmark for Assessing the Performance of Virtual Screening Models.

Structure-based virtual screening (SBVS) is a key workflow in computational drug discovery. SBVS models are assessed by measuring the enrichment of known active molecules over decoys in retrospective screens. However, the standard formula for enrichment cannot estimate model performance on very large libraries. Additionally, current screening benchmarks cannot easily be used with machine learning (ML) models due to data leakage. We propose an improved formula for calculating VS enrichment and introduce the BayesBind benchmarking set composed of protein targets that are structurally dissimilar to those in the BigBind training set. We assess current models on this benchmark and find that none perform appreciably better than a KNN baseline. We publicly release the BayesBind benchmark at https://github.com/molecularmodelinglab/bigbind.

Synthesis of 5-Benzylamino and 5-Alkylamino-Substituted Pyrimido[4,5-c]quinoline Derivatives as CSNK2A Inhibitors with Antiviral Activity.

A series of 5-benzylamine-substituted pyrimido[4,5-c]quinoline derivatives of the CSNK2A chemical probe SGC-CK2-2 were synthesized with the goal of improving kinase inhibitor cellular potency and antiviral phenotypic activity while maintaining aqueous solubility. Among the range of analogs, those bearing electron-withdrawing (4c and 4g) or donating (4f) substituents on the benzyl ring as well as introduction of non-aromatic groups such as the cyclohexylmethyl (4t) were shown to maintain CSNK2A activity. The CSNK2A activity was also retained with N-methylation of SGC-CK2-2, but α-methyl substitution of the benzyl substituent led to a 10-fold reduction in potency. CSNK2A inhibition potency was restored with indene-based compound 4af, with activity residing in the S-enantiomer (4ag). Analogs with the highest CSNK2A potency showed good activity for inhibition of Mouse Hepatitis Virus (MHV) replication. Conformational analysis indicated that analogs with the best CSNK2A inhibition (4t, 4ac, and 4af) exhibited smaller differences between their ground state conformation and their predicted binding pose. Analogs with reduced activity (4ad, 4ae, and 4ai) required more substantial conformational changes from their ground state within the CSNK2A protein pocket.

HIt Discovery using docking ENriched by GEnerative Modeling (HIDDEN GEM): A novel computational workflow for accelerated virtual screening of ultra-large chemical libraries.

Recent rapid expansion of make-on-demand, purchasable, chemical libraries comprising dozens of billions or even trillions of molecules has challenged the efficient application of traditional structure-based virtual screening methods that rely on molecular docking. We present a novel computational methodology termed HIDDEN GEM (HIt Discovery using Docking ENriched by GEnerative Modeling) that greatly accelerates virtual screening. This workflow uniquely integrates machine learning, generative chemistry, massive chemical similarity searching and molecular docking of small, selected libraries in the beginning and the end of the workflow. For each target, HIDDEN GEM nominates a small number of top-scoring virtual hits prioritized from ultra-large chemical libraries. We have benchmarked HIDDEN GEM by conducting virtual screening campaigns for 16 diverse protein targets using Enamine REAL Space library comprising 37 billion molecules. We show that HIDDEN GEM yields the highest enrichment factors as compared to state of the art accelerated virtual screening methods, while requiring the least computational resources. HIDDEN GEM can be executed with any docking software and employed by users with limited computational resources.

BigBind: Learning from Nonstructural Data for Structure-Based Virtual Screening.

Deep learning methods that predict protein-ligand binding have recently been used for structure-based virtual screening. Many such models have been trained using protein-ligand complexes with known crystal structures and activities from the PDBBind data set. However, because PDBbind only includes 20K complexes, models typically fail to generalize to new targets, and model performance is on par with models trained with only ligand information. Conversely, the ChEMBL database contains a wealth of chemical activity information but includes no information about binding poses. We introduce BigBind, a data set that maps ChEMBL activity data to proteins from the CrossDocked data set. BigBind comprises 583 K ligand activities and includes 3D structures of the protein binding pockets. Additionally, we augmented the data by adding an equal number of putative inactives for each target. Using this data, we developed Banana (basic neural network for binding affinity), a neural network-based model to classify active from inactive compounds, defined by a 10 µM cutoff. Our model achieved an AUC of 0.72 on BigBind's test set, while a ligand-only model achieved an AUC of 0.59. Furthermore, Banana achieved competitive performance on the LIT-PCBA benchmark (median EF1% 1.81) while running 16,000 times faster than molecular docking with Gnina. We suggest that Banana, as well as other models trained on this data set, will significantly improve the outcomes of prospective virtual screening tasks.

Mixed, nonclassical behavior in a classic allosteric protein.

Allostery is a major driver of biological processes requiring coordination. Thus, it is one of the most fundamental and remarkable phenomena in nature, and there is motivation to understand and manipulate it to a multitude of ends. Today, it is often described in terms of two phenomenological models proposed more than a half-century ago involving only T(tense) or R(relaxed) conformations. Here, methyl-based NMR provides extensive detail on a dynamic T to R switch in the classical dimeric allosteric protein, yeast chorismate mutase (CM), that occurs in the absence of substrate, but only with the activator bound. Switching of individual subunits is uncoupled based on direct observation of mixed TR states in the dimer. This unique finding excludes both classic models and solves the paradox of a coexisting hyperbolic binding curve and highly skewed substrate-free T-R equilibrium. Surprisingly, structures of the activator-bound and effector-free forms of CM appear the same by NMR, providing another example of the need to account for dynamic ensembles. The apo enzyme, which has a sigmoidal activity profile, is shown to switch, not to R, but to a related high-energy state. Thus, the conformational repertoire of CM does not just change as a matter of degree depending on the allosteric input, be it effector and/or substrate. Rather, the allosteric model appears to completely change in different contexts, which is only consistent with modern ensemble-based frameworks.

Accurate ligand-protein docking in CASP15 using the ClusPro LigTBM server.

In the ligand prediction category of CASP15, the challenge was to predict the positions and conformations of small molecules binding to proteins that were provided as amino acid sequences or as models generated by the AlphaFold2 program. For most targets, we used our template-based ligand docking program ClusPro ligTBM, also implemented as a public server available at https://ligtbm.cluspro.org/. Since many targets had multiple chains and a number of ligands, several templates, and some manual interventions were required. In a few cases, no templates were found, and we had to use direct docking using the Glide program. Nevertheless, ligTBM was shown to be a very useful tool, and by any ranking criteria, our group was ranked among the top five best-performing teams. In fact, all the best groups used template-based docking methods. Thus, it appears that the AlphaFold2-generated models, despite the high accuracy of the predicted backbone, have local differences from the x-ray structure that make the use of direct docking methods more challenging. The results of CASP15 confirm that this limitation can be frequently overcome by homology-based docking.

PLANTAIN: Diffusion-inspired Pose Score Minimization for Fast and Accurate Molecular Docking.

Molecular docking aims to predict the 3D pose of a small molecule in a protein binding site. Traditional docking methods predict ligand poses by minimizing a physics-inspired scoring function. Recently, a diffusion model has been proposed that iteratively refines a ligand pose. We combine these two approaches by training a pose scoring function in a diffusion-inspired manner. In our method, PLANTAIN, a neural network is used to develop a very fast pose scoring function. We parameterize a simple scoring function on the fly and use L-BFGS minimization to optimize an initially random ligand pose. Using rigorous benchmarking practices, we demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance while running ten times faster than the next-best method. We release PLANTAIN publicly and hope that it improves the utility of virtual screening workflows.

Tyrosinase-Catalyzed Peptide Macrocyclization for mRNA Display.

mRNA display of macrocyclic peptides has proven itself to be a powerful technique to discover high-affinity ligands for a protein target. However, only a limited number of cyclization chemistries are known to be compatible with mRNA display. Tyrosinase is a copper-dependent oxidase that oxidizes tyrosine phenol to an electrophilic o-quinone, which is readily attacked by cysteine thiol. Here we show that peptides containing tyrosine and cysteine are rapidly cyclized upon tyrosinase treatment. Characterization of the cyclization reveals it to be widely applicable to multiple macrocycle sizes and scaffolds. We combine tyrosinase-mediated cyclization with mRNA display to discover new macrocyclic ligands targeting melanoma-associated antigen A4 (MAGE-A4). These macrocycles potently inhibit the MAGE-A4 binding axis with nanomolar IC50 values. Importantly, macrocyclic ligands show clear advantage over noncyclized analogues with ∼40-fold or greater decrease in IC50 values.

Integrated approach to elucidate metal-implant related adverse outcome pathways.

Exogenous metal particles and ions from implant devices are known to cause severe toxic events with symptoms ranging from adverse local tissue reactions to systemic toxicities, potentially leading to the development of cancers, heart conditions, and neurological disorders. Toxicity mechanisms, also known as Adverse Outcome Pathways (AOPs), that explain these metal-induced toxicities are severely understudied. Therefore, we deployed in silico structure- and knowledge-based approaches to identify proteome-level perturbations caused by metals and pathways that link these events to human diseases. We captured 177 structure-based, 347 knowledge-based, and 402 imputed metal-gene/protein relationships for chromium, cobalt, molybdenum, nickel, and titanium. We prioritized 72 proteins hypothesized to directly contact implant surfaces and contribute to adverse outcomes. Results of this exploratory analysis were formalized as structured AOPs. We considered three case studies reflecting the following possible situations: (i) the metal-protein-disease relationship was previously known; (ii) the metal-protein, protein-disease, and metal-disease relationships were individually known but were not linked (as a unified AOP); and (iii) one of three relationships was unknown and was imputed by our methods. These situations were illustrated by case studies on nickel-induced allergy/hypersensitivity, cobalt-induced heart failure, and titanium-induced periprosthetic osteolysis, respectively. All workflows, data, and results are freely available in https://github.com/DnlRKorn/Knowledge_Based_Metallomics/. An interactive view of select data is available at the ROBOKOP Neo4j Browser at http://robokopkg.renci.org/browser/.

Conserved coronavirus proteins as targets of broad-spectrum antivirals.

Coronaviruses are a class of single-stranded, positive-sense RNA viruses that have caused three major outbreaks over the past two decades: Middle East respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus (MERS-CoV), severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). All outbreaks have been associated with significant morbidity and mortality. In this study, we have identified and explored conserved binding sites in the key coronavirus proteins for the development of broad-spectrum direct acting anti-coronaviral compounds and validated the significance of this conservation for drug discovery with existing experimental data. We have identified four coronaviral proteins with highly conserved binding site sequence and 3D structure similarity: PLpro, Mpro, nsp10-nsp16 complex(methyltransferase), and nsp15 endoribonuclease. We have compiled all available experimental data for known antiviral medications inhibiting these targets and identified compounds active against multiple coronaviruses. The identified compounds representing potential broad-spectrum antivirals include: GC376, which is active against six viral Mpro (out of six tested, as described in research literature); mycophenolic acid, which is active against four viral PLpro (out of four); and emetine, which is active against four viral RdRp (out of four). The approach described in this study for coronaviruses, which combines the assessment of sequence and structure conservation across a viral family with the analysis of accessible chemical structure - antiviral activity data, can be explored for the development of broad-spectrum drugs for multiple viral families.

Mapping co-regulatory interactions among ligand-binding sites in ryanodine receptor 1.

Ryanodine receptor 1 (RyR1) is an intracellular calcium ion (Ca2+ ) release channel required for skeletal muscle contraction. Although cryo-electron microscopy identified binding sites of three coactivators Ca2+ , ATP, and caffeine (CFF), the mechanism of co-regulation and synergy of these activators is unknown. Here, we report allosteric connections among the three ligand-binding sites and pore region in (i) Ca2+ bound-closed, (ii) ATP/CFF bound-closed, (iii) Ca2+ /ATP/CFF bound-closed, and (iv) Ca2+ /ATP/CFF bound-open RyR1 states. We identified two dominant networks of interactions that mediate communication between the Ca2+ -binding site and pore region in Ca2+ bound-closed state, which partially overlapped with the pore communications in ATP/CFF bound-closed RyR1 state. In Ca2+ /ATP/CFF bound-closed and -open RyR1 states, co-regulatory interactions were analogous to communications in the Ca2+ bound-closed and ATP/CFF bound-closed states. Both ATP- and CFF-binding sites mediate communication between the Ca2+ -binding site and the pore region in Ca2+ /ATP/CFF bound-open RyR1 structure. We conclude that Ca2+ , ATP, and CFF propagate their effects to the pore region through a network of overlapping interactions that mediate allosteric control and molecular synergy in channel regulation.

Structure of prion ß-oligomers as determined by short-distance crosslinking constraint-guided discrete molecular dynamics simulations.

The conversion of the native monomeric cellular prion protein (PrPC ) into an aggregated pathological ß-oligomeric form (PrPß ) and an infectious form (PrPSc ) is the central element in the development of prion diseases. The structure of the aggregates and the molecular mechanisms of the conformational changes involved in the conversion are still unknown. We applied mass spectrometry combined with chemical crosslinking, hydrogen/deuterium exchange, limited proteolysis, and surface modification for the differential characterization of the native and the urea+acid-converted prion ß-oligomer structures to obtain insights into the mechanisms of conversion and aggregation. For the determination of the structure of the monomer and the dimer unit of the ß-oligomer, we applied a recently-developed approach for de novo protein structure determination which is based on the incorporation of zero-length and short-distance crosslinking data as intra- and inter-protein constraints in discrete molecular dynamics simulations (CL-DMD). Based on all of the structural-proteomics experimental data and the computationally predicted structures of the monomer units, we propose the potential mode of assembly of the ß-oligomer. The proposed ß-oligomer assembly provides a clue on the ß-sheet nucleation site, and how template-based conversion of the native prion molecule occurs, growth of the prion aggregates, and maturation into fibrils may occur.

Learning from history: do not flatten the curve of antiviral research!

Here, we explore the dynamics of the response of the scientific community to several epidemics, including Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), as assessed by the numbers of clinical trials, publications, and level of research funding over time. All six prior epidemics studied [bird flu, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), swine flu, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Ebola, and Zika] were characterized by an initial spike of research response that flattened shortly thereafter. Unfortunately, no antiviral medications have been discovered to date as treatments for any of these diseases. By contrast, the HIV/AIDS pandemic has garnered consistent research investment since it began and resulted in drugs being developed within 7 years of its start date, with many more to follow. We argue that, to develop effective treatments for COVID-19 and be prepared for future epidemics, long-term, consistent investment in antiviral research is needed.

Ligand-induced disorder-to-order transitions characterized by structural proteomics and molecular dynamics simulations.

For disordered proteins, ligand binding can be a critical event that changes their structural dynamics. The ability to characterize such changes would facilitate the development of drugs designed to stabilize disordered proteins, whose mis-folding is important for a number of pathologies, including neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. In this study, we used hydrogen/deuterium exchange, differential crosslinking, differential surface modification, and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to characterize the structural changes in disordered proteins that result from ligand binding. We show here that both an ATP-independent protein chaperone, Spy L32P, and the FK506 binding domain of a prolyl isomerase, FKBP-25 F145A/I223P, are disordered, yet exhibit structures that are distinct from chemically denatured unfolded states in solution, and that they undergo transitions to a more structured state upon ligand binding. These systems may serve as models for the characterization of ligand-induced disorder-to-order transitions in proteins using structural proteomics approaches. SIGNIFICANCE: In this study, we used hydrogen/deuterium exchange, differential crosslinking, differential surface modification, and molecular-dynamics simulations to characterize the structural changes in disordered proteins that result from ligand binding. The protein-ligand systems studied here (the ATP-independent protein chaperone, Spy L32P, and the FK506 binding domain of a prolyl isomerase, FKBP-25 F145A/I223P) may serve as models for understanding ligand-induced disorder-to-order transitions in proteins. Additionally, the structural proteomic techniques demonstrated here are shown to be effective tools for the characterization of disorder-to-order transitions and can be used to facilitate study of other systems in which this class of structural transition can be used for modulating major pathological features of disease, such as the abnormal protein aggregation that occurs with Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.