Actives-Based Receptor Selection Strongly Increases Success Rate in Structure-Based Drug Design and Leads to Identification of 22 Unique Potent Cancer Inhibitors

Computer-aided drug design, an important component of the early stages of the drug discovery pipeline, routinely identifies large numbers of false positive hits that are subsequently confirmed to be experimentally inactive compounds. We have developed a methodology to improve true positive prediction rates in structure-based drug design and have successfully applied the protocol to twenty target systems and identified the top three performing conformers for each of the targets. Receptor performance was evaluated based on the area under the curve of the receiver operating characteristic curve for two independent sets of known actives. For a subset of five diverse cancer-related disease targets, we validated our approach through experimental testing of the top 50 compounds from a blind screening of a small molecule library containing hundreds of thousands of compounds. Our methods of receptor and compound selection resulted in the identification of 22 novel inhibitors in the low μM-nM range, with the most potent being an EGFR inhibitor with an IC50 value of 7.96 nM. Additionally for a subset of five independent target systems, we demonstrated the utility of Gaussian accelerated Molecular Dynamics to thoroughly explore a target system’s potential energy surface and generate highly predictive receptor conformations.