Identification of Novel GANT61 Analogs with Activity in Hedgehog Functional Assays and GLI1-Dependent Cancer Cells.

Aberrant activation of hedgehog (Hh) signaling has been implicated in various cancers. Current FDA-approved inhibitors target the seven-transmembrane receptor Smoothened, but resistance to these drugs has been observed. It has been proposed that a more promising strategy to target this pathway is at the GLI1 transcription factor level. GANT61 was the first small molecule identified to directly suppress GLI-mediated activity; however, its development as a potential anti-cancer agent has been hindered by its modest activity and aqueous chemical instability. Our study aimed to identify novel GLI1 inhibitors. JChem searches identified fifty-two compounds similar to GANT61 and its active metabolite, GANT61-D. We combined high-throughput cell-based assays and molecular docking to evaluate these analogs. Five of the fifty-two GANT61 analogs inhibited activity in Hh-responsive C3H10T1/2 and Gli-reporter NIH3T3 cellular assays without cytotoxicity. Two of the GANT61 analogs, BAS 07019774 and Z27610715, reduced Gli1 mRNA expression in C3H10T1/2 cells. Treatment with BAS 07019774 significantly reduced cell viability in Hh-dependent glioblastoma and lung cancer cell lines. Molecular docking indicated that BAS 07019774 is predicted to bind to the ZF4 region of GLI1, potentially interfering with its ability to bind DNA. Our findings show promise in developing more effective and potent GLI inhibitors.

Innervation of nociceptor neurons in the spleen promotes germinal center responses and humoral immunity.

Peripheral sensory neurons widely innervate various tissues to continuously monitor and respond to environmental stimuli. Whether peripheral sensory neurons innervate the spleen and modulate splenic immune response remains poorly defined. Here, we demonstrate that nociceptive sensory nerve fibers extensively innervate the spleen along blood vessels and reach B cell zones. The spleen-innervating nociceptors predominantly originate from left T8-T13 dorsal root ganglia (DRGs), promoting the splenic germinal center (GC) response and humoral immunity. Nociceptors can be activated by antigen-induced accumulation of splenic prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) and then release calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP), which further promotes the splenic GC response at the early stage. Mechanistically, CGRP directly acts on B cells through its receptor CALCRL-RAMP1 via the cyclic AMP (cAMP) signaling pathway. Activating nociceptors by ingesting capsaicin enhances the splenic GC response and anti-influenza immunity. Collectively, our study establishes a specific DRG-spleen sensory neural connection that promotes humoral immunity, suggesting a promising approach for improving host defense by targeting the nociceptive nervous system.

Applying a Gene Reversal Rate Computational Methodology to Identify Drugs for a Rare Cancer: Inflammatory Breast Cancer.

The aim of this study was to utilize a computational methodology based on Gene Reversal Rate (GRR) scoring to repurpose existing drugs for a rare and understudied cancer: inflammatory breast cancer (IBC). This method uses IBC-related gene expression signatures (GES) and drug-induced gene expression profiles from the LINCS database to calculate a GRR score for each candidate drug, and is based on the idea that a compound that can counteract gene expression changes of a disease may have potential therapeutic applications for that disease. Genes related to IBC with associated differential expression data (265 up-regulated and 122 down-regulated) were collated from PubMed-indexed publications. Drug-induced gene expression profiles were downloaded from the LINCS database and candidate drugs to treat IBC were predicted using their GRR scores. Thirty-two (32) drug perturbations that could potentially reverse the pre-compiled list of 297 IBC genes were obtained using the LINCS Canvas Browser (LCB) analysis. Binary combinations of the 32 perturbations were assessed computationally to identify combined perturbations with the highest GRR scores, and resulted in 131 combinations with GRR greater than 80%, that reverse up to 264 of the 297 genes in the IBC-GES. The top 35 combinations involve 20 unique individual drug perturbations, and 19 potential drug candidates. A comprehensive literature search confirmed 17 of the 19 known drugs as having either anti-cancer or anti-inflammatory activities. AZD-7545, BMS-754807, and nimesulide target known IBC relevant genes: PDK, Met, and COX, respectively. AG-14361, butalbital, and clobenpropit are known to be functionally relevant in DNA damage, cell cycle, and apoptosis, respectively. These findings support the use of the GRR approach to identify drug candidates and potential combination therapies that could be used to treat rare diseases such as IBC.

Lead/Drug Discovery from Natural Resources.

Natural products and their derivatives have been shown to be effective drug candidates against various diseases for many years. Over a long period of time, nature has produced an abundant and prosperous source pool for novel therapeutic agents with distinctive structures. Major natural-product-based drugs approved for clinical use include anti-infectives and anticancer agents. This paper will review some natural-product-related potent anticancer, anti-HIV, antibacterial and antimalarial drugs or lead compounds mainly discovered from 2016 to 2022. Structurally typical marine bioactive products are also included. Molecular modeling, machine learning, bioinformatics and other computer-assisted techniques that are very important in narrowing down bioactive core structural scaffolds and helping to design new structures to fight against key disease-associated molecular targets based on available natural products are considered and briefly reviewed.

Cheminformatics Modeling of Gene Silencing for Both Natural and Chemically Modified siRNAs.

In designing effective siRNAs for a specific mRNA target, it is critically important to have predictive models for the potency of siRNAs. None of the published methods characterized the chemical structures of individual nucleotides constituting a siRNA molecule; therefore, they cannot predict the potency of gene silencing by chemically modified siRNAs (cm-siRNA). We propose a new approach that can predict the potency of gene silencing by cm-siRNAs, which characterizes each nucleotide (NT) using 12 BCUT cheminformatics descriptors describing its charge distribution, hydrophobic and polar properties. Thus, a 21-NT siRNA molecule is described by 252 descriptors resulting from concatenating all the BCUT values of its composing nucleotides. Partial Least Square is employed to develop statistical models. The Huesken data (2431 natural siRNA molecules) were used to perform model building and evaluation for natural siRNAs. Our results were comparable with or superior to those from Huesken's algorithm. The Bramsen dataset (48 cm-siRNAs) was used to build and test the models for cm-siRNAs. The predictive r2 of the resulting models reached 0.65 (or Pearson r values of 0.82). Thus, this new method can be used to successfully model gene silencing potency by both natural and chemically modified siRNA molecules.

Data Mining Meets Machine Learning: A Novel ANN-based Multi-body Interaction Docking Scoring Function (MBI-score) Based on Utilizing Frequent Geometric and Chemical Patterns of Interfacial Atoms in Native Protein-ligand Complexes.

Accurate prediction of binding poses is crucial to structure-based drug design. We employ two powerful artificial intelligence (AI) approaches, data-mining and machine-learning, to design artificial neural network (ANN) based pose-scoring function. It is a simple machine-learning-based statistical function that employs frequent geometric and chemical patterns of interacting atoms at protein-ligand interfaces. The patterns are derived by mining interfaces of "native" protein-ligand complexes. Each interface is represented by a graph where nodes are atoms and edges connect protein-ligand interfacial atoms located within certain cutoff distance of each other. Applying frequent subgraph mining to these interfaces provides "native" frequent patterns of interacting atoms. Subsequently, given a pose for a protein-ligand complex of interest, the pose-scoring function (the information-processing unit or neuron) calculates the degree of matching between the interaction patterns present at the pose's interface and the native frequent patterns. The pose-scoring function takes into account the frequency of occurrence of the matching native patterns, the size of the match, and the degree of geometrical similarity between pose-specific and matching native frequent patterns. This novel "multi-body interaction" pose-scoring function (MBI-Score) was validated using two databases, PDBbind and Astex-85, and it outperformed seven commonly used commercial scoring functions. MBI-Score is available at www.khashanlab.org/mbi-score.

Learning Drug-Disease-Target Embedding (DDTE) from knowledge graphs to inform drug repurposing hypotheses.

We aimed to develop and validate a new graph embedding algorithm for embedding drug-disease-target networks to generate novel drug repurposing hypotheses. Our model denotes drugs, diseases and targets as subjects, predicates and objects, respectively. Each entity is represented by a multidimensional vector and the predicate is regarded as a translation vector from a subject to an object vectors. These vectors are optimized so that when a subject-predicate-object triple represents a known drug-disease-target relationship, the summed vector between the subject and the predicate is to be close to that of the object; otherwise, the summed vector is distant from the object. The DTINet dataset was utilized to test this algorithm and discover unknown links between drugs and diseases. In cross-validation experiments, this new algorithm outperformed the original DTINet model. The MRR (Mean Reciprocal Rank) values of our models were around 0.80 while those of the original model were about 0.70. In addition, we have identified and verified several pairs of new therapeutic relations as well as adverse effect relations that were not recorded in the original DTINet dataset. This approach showed excellent performance, and the predicted drug-disease and drug-side-effect relationships were found to be consistent with literature reports. This novel method can be used to analyze diverse types of emerging biomedical and healthcare-related knowledge graphs (KG).

A semantic similarity based methodology for predicting protein-protein interactions: Evaluation with P53-interacting kinases.

Biomedical literature contains unstructured, rich information regarding proteins, ligands, diseases as well as biological pathways in which they are involved. Systematically analyzing such textual corpus has the potential for biomedical discovery of new protein-protein interactions and hidden drug indications. For this purpose, we have investigated a methodology that is based on a well-established text mining tool, Word2Vec, for the analysis of PubMed full text articles to derive word embeddings, and the use of a simple semantic similarity comparison either by itself or in conjunction with k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) technique for the prediction of new relationships. To test this methodology, three lines of retrospective analyses of a dataset with known P53-interacting proteins have been conducted. First, we demonstrated that Word2Vec semantic similarity can infer functional relatedness among all kinases known to interact with P53. Second, in a series of time-split experiments, we demonstrated that both a simple similarity comparison and kNN models built with papers published up to a certain year were able to discover P53 interactors described in later publications. Third, in a different scenario of time-split experiments, we examined the predictions of P53-interacting proteins based on the kNN models built on data prior to a certain split year for different time ranges past that year, and found that the cumulative number of correct predictions was indeed increasing with time. We conclude that text mining of research papers in the PubMed literature based on Word2Vec analysis followed by a simple similarity comparison or kNN modeling affords excellent predictions of protein-protein interactions between P53 and kinases, and should have wide applications in translational biomedical studies such as repurposing of existing drugs, drug-drug interaction, and elucidation of mechanisms of action for drugs.

Literature-Wide Association Studies (LWAS) for a Rare Disease: Drug Repurposing for Inflammatory Breast Cancer.

Drug repurposing is an effective means for rapid drug discovery. The aim of this study was to develop and validate a computational methodology based on Literature-Wide Association Studies (LWAS) of PubMed to repurpose existing drugs for a rare inflammatory breast cancer (IBC). We have developed a methodology that conducted LWAS based on the text mining technology Word2Vec. 3.80 million "cancer"-related PubMed abstracts were processed as the corpus for Word2Vec to derive vector representation of biological concepts. These vectors for drugs and diseases served as the foundation for creating similarity maps of drugs and diseases, respectively, which were then employed to find potential therapy for IBC. Three hundred and thirty-six (336) known drugs and three hundred and seventy (370) diseases were expressed as vectors in this study. Nine hundred and seventy (970) previously known drug-disease association pairs among these drugs and diseases were used as the reference set. Based on the hypothesis that similar drugs can be used against similar diseases, we have identified 18 diseases similar to IBC, with 24 corresponding known drugs proposed to be the repurposing therapy for IBC. The literature search confirmed most known drugs tested for IBC, with four of them being novel candidates. We conclude that LWAS based on the Word2Vec technology is a novel approach to drug repurposing especially useful for rare diseases.

TNFAIP8 regulates autophagy, cell steatosis, and promotes hepatocellular carcinoma cell proliferation.

Tumor necrosis factor-α-induced protein 8 (TNFAIP8) expression has been linked to tumor progression in various cancer types, but the detailed mechanisms of TNFAIP8 are not fully elucidated. Here we define the role of TNFAIP8 in early events associated with development of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Increased TNFAIP8 levels in HCC cells enhanced cell survival by blocking apoptosis, rendering HCC cells more resistant to the anticancer drugs, sorafenib and regorafenib. TNFAIP8 also induced autophagy and steatosis in liver cancer cells. Consistent with these observations, TNFAIP8 blocked AKT/mTOR signaling and showed direct interaction with ATG3-ATG7 proteins. TNFAIP8 also exhibited binding with fatty acids and modulated expression of lipid/fatty-acid metabolizing enzymes. Chronic feeding of mice with alcohol increased hepatic levels of TNFAIP8, autophagy, and steatosis but not in high-fat-fed obese mice. Similarly, higher TNFAIP8 expression was associated with steatotic livers of human patients with a history of alcohol use but not in steatotic patients with no history of alcohol use. Our data indicate a novel role of TNFAIP8 in modulation of drug resistance, autophagy, and hepatic steatosis, all key early events in HCC progression.

Oncogenic Role of Tumor Necrosis Factor α-Induced Protein 8 (TNFAIP8).

Tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α-induced protein 8 (TNFAIP8) is a founding member of the TIPE family, which also includes TNFAIP8-like 1 (TIPE1), TNFAIP8-like 2 (TIPE2), and TNFAIP8-like 3 (TIPE3) proteins. Expression of TNFAIP8 is strongly associated with the development of various cancers including cancer of the prostate, liver, lung, breast, colon, esophagus, ovary, cervix, pancreas, and others. In human cancers, TNFAIP8 promotes cell proliferation, invasion, metastasis, drug resistance, autophagy, and tumorigenesis by inhibition of cell apoptosis. In order to better understand the molecular aspects, biological functions, and potential roles of TNFAIP8 in carcinogenesis, in this review, we focused on the expression, regulation, structural aspects, modifications/interactions, and oncogenic role of TNFAIP8 proteins in human cancers.

Novel HIV-1 Non-nucleoside Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitor Agents: Optimization of Diarylanilines with High Potency against Wild-Type and Rilpivirine-Resistant E138K Mutant Virus.

Three series (6, 13, and 14) of new diarylaniline (DAAN) analogues were designed, synthesized, and evaluated for anti-HIV potency, especially against the E138K viral strain with a major mutation conferring resistance to the new-generation non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor drug rilpivirine (1b). Promising new compounds were then assessed for physicochemical and associated pharmaceutical properties, including aqueous solubility, log P value, and metabolic stability, as well as predicted lipophilic parameters of ligand efficiency, ligand lipophilic efficiency, and ligand efficiency-dependent lipophilicity indices, which are associated with ADME property profiles. Compounds 6a, 14c, and 14d showed high potency against the 1b-resistant E138K mutated viral strain as well as good balance between anti-HIV-1 activity and desirable druglike properties. From the perspective of optimizing future NNRTI compounds as clinical trial candidates, computational modeling results provided valuable information about how the R(1) group might provide greater efficacy against the E138K mutant.

Assay development and multivariate scoring for high-content discovery of chemoprotectants of endoplasmic-reticulum-stress-mediated amylin-induced cytotoxicity in pancreatic beta cells.

The underlying pathogenesis of type-II diabetes mellitus is in the dysfunction and selective loss of pancreatic islet ß-cells, which ultimately leads to underproduction of endogenous insulin. Amylin, a 37-amino-acid human hormone that is cosecreted with insulin, helps regulate gastric emptying and maintain blood glucose homeostasis through improved postprandial satiety. It is hypothesized that amylin protofibrils cause selective loss of pancreatic ß-cells in a manner similar to amyloid ß aggregation in Alzheimer's disease. ß-Cell death occurs in vitro when isolated human or rodent ß-cells are exposed to micromolar concentrations of amylin, but the exact mechanism of selective ß-cell loss in vivo remains unknown. Therefore, pursuing small-molecule drug discovery for chemoprotectants of amylin-induced ß-cell toxicity is a viable phenotypic target that can lead to potential pharmacotherapies for the preservation of ß-cell mass, delaying insulin dependence and allowing additional opportunities for lifestyle intervention. Additionally, chronic endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress induced by chronic hyperglycemia and hyperlipidemia is a potentiating factor of amylin-induced ß-cell loss. Herein, we describe a high-content/high-throughput screening (HTS) assay for the discovery of small molecules that are chemoprotective of amylin-induced, ER-stress-potentiated ß-cell loss. We also put forth a general method for construction of a robust well-level multivariate scoring system using partial least squares regression analysis to improve high-content assay performance and to streamline the association of complex high-content data into HTS activity databases where univariate responses are typical.

RapidMic: Rapid Computation of the Maximal Information Coefficient.

To discover relationships and associations rapidly in large-scale datasets, we propose a cross-platform tool for the rapid computation of the maximal information coefficient based on parallel computing methods. Through parallel processing, the provided tool can effectively analyze large-scale biological datasets with a markedly reduced computing time. The experimental results show that the proposed tool is notably fast, and is able to perform an all-pairs analysis of a large biological dataset using a normal computer. The source code and guidelines can be downloaded from https://github.com/HelloWorldCN/RapidMic.

The Development of Novel Chemical Fragment-Based Descriptors Using Frequent Common Subgraph Mining Approach and Their Application in QSAR Modeling.

We present a novel approach to generating fragment-based molecular descriptors. The molecules are represented by labeled undirected chemical graph. Fast Frequent Subgraph Mining (FFSM) is used to find chemical-fragments (subgraphs) that occur in at least a subset of all molecules in a dataset. The collection of frequent subgraphs (FSG) forms a dataset-specific descriptors whose values for each molecule are defined by the number of times each frequent fragment occurs in this molecule. We have employed the FSG descriptors to develop variable selection k Nearest Neighbor (kNN) QSAR models of several datasets with binary target property including Maximum Recommended Therapeutic Dose (MRTD), Salmonella Mutagenicity (Ames Genotoxicity), and P-Glycoprotein (PGP) data. Each dataset was divided into training, test, and validation sets to establish the statistical figures of merit reflecting the model validated predictive power. The classification accuracies of models for both training and test sets for all datasets exceeded 75 %, and the accuracy for the external validation sets exceeded 72 %. The model accuracies were comparable or better than those reported earlier in the literature for the same datasets. Furthermore, the use of fragment-based descriptors affords mechanistic interpretation of validated QSAR models in terms of essential chemical fragments responsible for the compounds' target property.

Scoring protein interaction decoys using exposed residues (SPIDER): a novel multibody interaction scoring function based on frequent geometric patterns of interfacial residues.

Accurate prediction of the structure of protein-protein complexes in computational docking experiments remains a formidable challenge. It has been recognized that identifying native or native-like poses among multiple decoys is the major bottleneck of the current scoring functions used in docking. We have developed a novel multibody pose-scoring function that has no theoretical limit on the number of residues contributing to the individual interaction terms. We use a coarse-grain representation of a protein-protein complex where each residue is represented by its side chain centroid. We apply a computational geometry approach called Almost-Delaunay tessellation that transforms protein-protein complexes into a residue contact network, or an undirectional graph where vertex-residues are nodes connected by edges. This treatment forms a family of interfacial graphs representing a dataset of protein-protein complexes. We then employ frequent subgraph mining approach to identify common interfacial residue patterns that appear in at least a subset of native protein-protein interfaces. The geometrical parameters and frequency of occurrence of each "native" pattern in the training set are used to develop the new SPIDER scoring function. SPIDER was validated using standard "ZDOCK" benchmark dataset that was not used in the development of SPIDER. We demonstrate that SPIDER scoring function ranks native and native-like poses above geometrical decoys and that it exceeds in performance a popular ZRANK scoring function. SPIDER was ranked among the top scoring functions in a recent round of CAPRI (Critical Assessment of PRedicted Interactions) blind test of protein-protein docking methods.

Receptor-based pharmacophore and pharmacophore key descriptors for virtual screening and QSAR modeling.

The intuitive nature of the pharmacophore concept has made it widely accepted by the medicinal chemistry community, evidenced by the past 3 decades of development and application of computerized pharmacophore modeling tools. On the other hand, shape complementarity has been recognized as a critical factor in molecular recognition between drugs and their receptors. Recent development of fast and accurate shape comparison tools has facilitated the wide spread use of shape matching technologies in drug discovery. However, pharmacophore and shape technologies, if used separately, often lead to high false positive rate. Thus, integrating pharmacophore matching and shape matching technologies into one program has the potential to reduce the false positive rates in virtual screening. Other issues of current pharmacophore technologies include sometimes high false negative rate and non-quantitative prediction. In this article, we first focus on a recently implemented method (Shape4) that combines receptor based shape matching and pharmacophore comparison in a single algorithm to create shape pharmacophore models for virtual screening. We also examine a recent example that utilizes multi-complex information to develop receptor-based pharmacophore models that promises to reduce false negative rate. Finally, we review several methods that employ receptor-based pharmacophore map and pharmacophore key descriptors for QSAR modeling. We conclude by emphasizing the concept of receptor-based shape pharmacophore and its roles in future drug discovery.

Structure-based quantitative structure--activity relationship modeling of estrogen receptor ß-ligands.

BACKGROUND: A variety of chemotypes have been studied as estrogen receptor (ER) ß-selective ligands for potential drugs against various indications, including neurodegenerative diseases. Their structure--activity relationship data and the x-ray structures of the ERß ligand-binding domain bound with different ligands have become available. Thus, it is vitally important for future development of ERß-selective ligands that robust quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) models be built. METHODS/RESULTS: We employed a newly developed structure--based QSAR method (structure-based pharmacophore keys QSAR) that utilizes both the structure--activity relationship data and the 3D structural information of ERß, as well as a robust QSAR workflow to analyze 37 ligands. Four sets of QSAR models were obtained, among which approximately 30 models afforded high (>0.60) training-r(2) and test set-R(2) statistics. CONCLUSION: We have obtained an ensemble of predictive models of ERß ligands that will be useful in the future discovery of novel ERß-selective molecules.

Informatics approach to the rational design of siRNA libraries.

This chapter surveys the literature for state-of-the-art methods for the rational design of siRNA libraries. It identifies and presents major milestones in the field of computational modeling of siRNA's gene silencing efficacy. Commonly used features of siRNAs are summarized along with major machine learning techniques employed to build the predictive models. It has also outlined several web-enabled siRNA design tools. To face the challenge of modeling and rational design of chemically modified siRNAs, it also proposes a new cheminformatics approach for the representation and characterization of siRNA molecules. Some preliminary results with this new approach are presented to demonstrate the promising potential of this method for the modeling of siRNA's efficacy. Together with novel delivery technologies and chemical modification techniques, rational siRNA design algorithms will ultimately contribute to chemical biology research and the efficient development of siRNA therapeutics.

Application of QSAR and shape pharmacophore modeling approaches for targeted chemical library design.

Optimization of chemical library composition affords more efficient identification of hits from biological screening experiments. The optimization could be achieved through rational selection of reagents used in combinatorial library synthesis. However, with a rapid advent of parallel synthesis methods and availability of millions of compounds synthesized by many vendors, it may be more efficient to design targeted libraries by means of virtual screening of commercial compound collections. This chapter reviews the application of advanced cheminformatics approaches such as quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR) and pharmacophore modeling (both ligand and structure based) for virtual screening. Both approaches rely on empirical SAR data to build models; thus, the emphasis is placed on achieving models of the highest rigor and external predictive power. We present several examples of successful applications of both approaches for virtual screening to illustrate their utility. We suggest that the expert use of both QSAR and pharmacophore models, either independently or in combination, enables users to achieve targeted libraries enriched with experimentally confirmed hit compounds.