Thymidine monophosphate kinase (TMPK) has emerged as an attractive target for developing inhibitors of Mycobacterium tuberculosis growth. In this study the receptor-independent (RI) 4D-QSAR formalism has been used to develop QSAR models and corresponding 3D-pharmacophores for a set of 5'-thiourea-substituted alpha-thymidine inhibitors. Models were developed for the entire training set and for a...

The incomplete seizure control with frequent adverse effects of current anticonvulsant drugs and the importance of semicarbazones, quinazolines and 2,5-disubstituted 1,3,4-thiadiazoles as anticonvulsant pharmacophore prompted us to carry out synthesis of three novel series of semicarbazones containing 1,3,4-thiadiazole and quinazoline ring. The chemical structures of these compounds were elucid...

Fentanyl is a highly selective μ-opioid receptor agonist with high analgesic activity. Three-dimensional pharmacophore models were built from a set of 50 fentanyl derivatives. These were employed to elucidate ligand-receptor interactions using information derived only from the ligand structure to identify new potential lead compounds. The present studies demonstrated that three hydrophobic regi...

A simple computational approach was developed to screen the Protein Data Bank (PDB) for putative pockets possessing a specific binding site chemistry and geometry. The method employs two commonly used 3D screening technologies, namely identification of cavities in protein structures and pharmacophore screening of chemical libraries. For each protein structure, a pocket finding algorithm is used...

Pharmacophores can be defined in a number of ways [1, 2]. From a physical standpoint a pharmacophore is a collection of electronic and steric features of a molecule that allow it to exhibit activity against a given biological target. More specifically, a pharmacophore can be defined by a set of atoms and various geometric (distances, angles, torsions) relationships between them. The pharmacopho...

Pharmacophore approaches have become one of the major tools in drug discovery after the past century's development. Various ligand-based and structure-based methods have been developed for improved pharmacophore modeling and have been successfully and extensively applied in virtual screening, de novo design and lead optimization. Despite these successes, pharmacophore approaches have not reache...

Pharmacophore-based virtual screening is an effective, inexpensive and fast approach to discovering useful starting points for drug discovery. In this study, we developed a pharmacophore model for the main proteinase of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV). Then we used this pharmacophore model to search NCI 3D database including 250, 251 compounds and identified 30 existing...

Complement activation plays a major role in many acute and chronic inflammatory conditions. C3d, a terminal product of complement activation, remains covalently attached to cells and is an excellent biomarker of complement-mediated inflammation. We employed a virtual high-throughput screening protocol to identify molecules with predicted binding to complement C3d and with intrinsic fluorescence...

One of the key ingredients in drug discovery is the derivation of conceptual templates called pharmacophores. A pharmacophore model characterizes the physicochemical properties common to all active molecules, called ligands, bound to a particular protein receptor, together with their relative spatial arrangement. Motivated by this important application, we develop a Bayesian hierarchical model ...

Phosphodiesterase 4 (PDE4) has been established as a promising target in asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. PDE4B subtype selective inhibitors are known to reduce the dose limiting adverse effect associated with non-selective PDE4B inhibitors. This makes the development of PDE4B subtype selective inhibitors a desirable research goal. To achieve this goal, ligand based pharmacopho...