Recent years have brought a flood of interest in developing compounds that selectively degrade protein targets in cells, as exemplified by PROTACs. Fully realizing the promise of PROTACs to transform chemical biology by delivering degraders of diverse and undruggable protein targets has been impeded, however, by the fact that designing a suitable chemical linker between the functional moieties requires extensive trial and error. Here, we describe a structure-based computational method to predict PROTAC activity. We envision that this approach will allow design and optimization of PROTACs for efficient target degradation, selection of E3 ligases best suited for pairing with a given target protein, and understanding the basis by which PROTACs can exhibit different target selectivity than their component warheads..
Protein-protein interactions represent an exciting and challenging target class for therapeutic intervention using small molecules. Protein interaction sites are often devoid of the deep surface pockets presented by “traditional” drug targets, and crystal structures reveal that inhibitors typically engage these sites using very shallow binding modes. As a consequence, modern virtual screening tools developed to identify inhibitors of traditional drug targets do not perform as well when they are instead deployed at protein interaction sites. To address the need for novel inhibitors of important protein interactions, here we introduce an alternate docking strategy specifically designed for this regime. Our method, termed DARC (Docking Approach using Ray-Casting), matches the topography of a surface pocket “observed” from within the protein to the topography “observed” when viewing a potential ligand from the same vantage point. We applied DARC to carry out a virtual screen against the protein interaction site of human anti-apoptotic protein Mcl-1, and found that 4 of the top-scoring 21 compounds showed clear inhibition in a biochemical assay. The Ki values for these compounds ranged from 1.2 to 21 µM, and each had ligand efficiency comparable to promising small-molecule inhibitors of other protein-protein interactions. These hit compounds do not resemble the natural (protein) binding partner of Mcl-1, nor do they resemble any known inhibitors of Mcl-1. Our results thus demonstrate the utility of DARC for identifying novel inhibitors of protein-protein interactions.
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