Challenges for Drug Discovery - A Case Study of Urokinase Receptor Inhibition

Urokinase receptor (uPAR) is a widely recognized target for potential treatment of cancer. The development of uPAR inhibitors has been going on for over a decade. Despite the identification and validation of many highly potent hits using screening or medicinal approaches, none of them has been moved further along the drug discovery pipeline. The development of uPAR inhibitors exemplifies several challenges now faced by drug discovery. These include 1) hydrophobicity and thus poor bioavailability of the inhibitors from screening approaches; 2) specificity of the inhibitor, where a peptidyl inhibitor causes conformational change of the receptor; 3) species specificity, where some inhibitors developed based on the human receptor do not inhibit the murine receptor and thus cannot be validated in mouse models. The recently determined crystal structures of uPAR in complex with its ligand or inhibitor not only provide the structural insight to understand these challenges but also offer a potential solution for further inhibitor development and thus illustrate the importance of structural information in facilitating drug discovery.