Combinatorial Chemistry & High Throughput Screening - Volume 11, Issue 6, 2008

The P2Y1 receptor is a member of the P2Y family of nucleotide-activated G protein-coupled receptors, and it is an important therapeutic target based on its broad tissue distribution and essential role in platelet aggregation. We have designed a set of highly selective and diverse pharmacological tools for studying the P2Y1 receptor using a rational approach to ligand design. Based on the discovery that bisphosph Read More

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Psychoactive Drug Screening Program (PDSP) is a resource that provides free screening of novel compounds to academic investigators. This program differs from other public-sector screening programs in that compounds are screened against a large panel of transmembrane receptors, channels, and transporters, a selection that currently includes a large portion of the whole n Read More

Advances in combinatorial chemistry and genomics have inspired the development of novel affinity selectionbased screening techniques that rely on mass spectrometry to identify compounds that preferentially bind to a protein target. Of the many affinity selection-mass spectrometry techniques so far documented, only a few solution-based implementations that separate target-ligand complexes away from unbound li Read More

With the advent of the recent determination of high-resolution crystal structures of bovine rhodopsin and human β2 adrenergic receptor (β2AR), there are still many structure-function relationships to be learned from other G protein- coupled receptors (GPCRs). Many of the pharmaceutically interesting GPCRs cannot be modeled because of their amino acid sequence divergence from bovine rhodopsin and β2AR. Structure det Read More

Antibodies are components of the body's humoral immune system that are generated in response to foreign pathogens. Modern biomedical research has employed these very specific and efficient molecules designed by nature in the diagnosis of diseases, localization of gene products as well as in the rapid screening of targets for drug discovery and testing. In addition, the introduction of antibodies with fluorescent or enz Read More

Full text available

High throughput in vitro microsomal stability assays are widely used in drug discovery as an indicator for in vivo stability, which affects pharmacokinetics. This is based on in-depth research involving a limited number of model drug-like compounds that are cleared predominantly by cytochrome P450 metabolism. However, drug discovery compounds are often not drug-like, are assessed with high throughput assays, Read More

Based on the classification of 20 amino acids, we reduce a protein primary sequence to six (0,1) sequences. For each of them, two so-called normalized relative-entropies are calculated and thus a 12-D vector is constructed to describe the protein primary sequence. The examination of similarities/dissimilarities among eight different proteins illustrates the utility of the approach.

Increasingly, chemical libraries are being produced which are focused on a biological target or group of related targets, rather than simply being constructed in a combinatorial fashion. A screening collection compiled from such libraries will contain multiple analogues of a number of discrete series of compounds. The question arises as to how many analogues are necessary to represent each series in order to ensure that an Read More