The resurgence of tuberculosis and the emergence of multidrug-resistant strains of Mycobacteria drugs has propelled the development of new structural classes of antitubercular agents. The present study was undertaken to investigate the opportunities which the enzyme dihydrofolate reductase, a promising drug target for treatment of Mycobacterial infections offers for the development of new TB dr...

During the last year we have developed Open3DQSAR, an open-source tool aimed at high-throughput 3DQSAR model building and evaluation [1]. During development, high performance and ease of automation were defined as primary goals; the first was achieved by implementation of parallelized algorithms and the second by adopting a scriptable interface. Molecular interaction fields of different kinds (...

We previously identified structurally diverse small molecule (non-peptidic) inhibitors (SMNPIs) of the botulinum neurotoxin serotype A (BoNT/A) light chain (LC). Of these, several (including antimalarial drugs) contained a 4-amino-7-chloroquinoline (ACQ) substructure and a separate positive ionizable amine component. The same antimalarials have also been found to interfere with BoNT/A transloca...

We are currently faced with a global infectious disease crisis which has been anticipated for decades. While many promising biotherapeutics are being tested, the search for a small molecule has yet to deliver an approved drug or therapeutic for the Ebola or similar filoviruses that cause haemorrhagic fever. Two recent high throughput screens published in 2013 did however identify several hits t...

Cannabinoid receptors (CB) are G-protein coupled receptors involved in many physiological processes, like learning, appetite, nociception and others. Two subtypes (termed CB1 and CB2) are involved in slightly different processes [1]. Thus, it is important to gain more insight into the the cannabinoid receptor system and the potential effects of cannabinoid therapeutics. By combining [2] 3D-QSAR...

BACKGROUND Virtual screening is used to distinguish potential leads from inactive compounds in a database of chemical samples. One method for accomplishing this is by docking compounds into the structure of a receptor binding site in order to rank-order compounds by the quality of the interactions they form with the receptor. It is generally established that docking can be reasonably successful...

Pharmacophore modeling can provide valuable insight into ligand-receptor interactions. It can also be used in 3D (dimensional) database searching for potentially finding biologically active compounds and providing new research ideas and directions for drug-discovery projects. To stimulate the structure-based drug design against SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), a pharmacophore search wa...

A combinatorial pharmacophore (CP) model for Multidrug and toxin extrusion 1 (MATE1/SLC47A1) inhibitors was developed based on a data set including 881 compounds. The CP model comprises four individual pharmacophore hypotheses, HHR1, DRR, HHR2 and AAAP, which can successfully identify the MATE1 inhibitors with an overall accuracy around 75%. The model emphasizes the importance of aromatic ring ...

Compstatin and its active peptide analogs can potentially be used for therapeutic purposes because their binding to the third component of complement prohibits its conversion into the proteolytically activated form of the third component of complement, thus inhibiting complement cascades in all three complement pathways. Mallik and Morikis built three quasi-dynamic pharmacophore models for comp...

Pressure is mounting on the pharmaceutical industry to reduce both the cost of drugs and the time to market. The large number of targets made available in the last decade has created a new area for technologies that can rapidly identify quality lead candidates. Virtual screening is one such technology that is gaining increasing importance in the drug discovery process. Virtual screening is a re...