Current Protein and Peptide Science - Volume 17, Issue 3, 2016

Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious diseases responsible for thousands of deaths worldwide. Due to the use of antimycobacterial drugs, TB prevalence seemed to be controlled, but with the appearance of resistant tuberculosis cases, the concern about the disease had become significant again, as well as the need for new alternatives to TB treatment. Since pyrazinamide (PZA) is part of the firstline agents in TB treatment, several derivatives of this drug were described, besides pyrazinoic acid (POA) derivatives, the active form of PZA. POA has been used mainly to design prodrugs to be activated by mycobacterial esterases, while PZA derivatives should be activated specifically by the nicotinamidase/ pyrazinamidase (PZAse), or other PZAse-independent pathways. The intention of this paper is to discuss the state of art of PZA and POA derivatives and their activity against Mycobacterium tuberculosis and other mycobacteria, besides the therapeutic potential. Focus was given in prodrugs and derivatives directed to mycobacterial enzymes involved in its activation or mechanism of action.

The ubiquitin-proteasome pathway (UPP) is the primary degradation system of short-lived regulatory proteins. Cellular processes such as the cell cycle, signal transduction, gene expression, DNA repair and apoptosis are regulated by this UPP and dysfunctions in this system have important implications in the development of cancer, neurodegenerative, cardiac and other human pathologies. UPP seems also to be very important in the function of eukaryote cells of the human parasites like Plasmodium falciparum, the causal agent of the neglected disease Malaria. Hence, the UPP could be considered as an attractive target for the development of compounds with Anti-Malarial or Anti-cancer properties. Recent online databases like ChEMBL contains a larger quantity of information in terms of pharmacological assay protocols and compounds tested as UPP inhibitors under many different conditions. This large amount of data give new openings for the computer-aided identification of UPP inhibitors, but the intrinsic data diversity is an obstacle for the development of successful classifiers. To solve this problem here we used the Bob-Jenkins moving average operators and the atom-based quadratic molecular indices calculated with the software TOMOCOMD-CARDD (TC) to develop a quantitative model for the prediction of the multiple outputs in this complex dataset. Our multi-target model can predict results for drugs against 22 molecular or cellular targets of different organisms with accuracies above 70% in both training and validation sets.

Neglected diseases are infectious diseases that affect poor people of tropical countries. Drug resistance, lower availability of funds and research hinder the opportunities for the development of new drugs. The need for new drugs will persist until pathogens are eradicated. This calls for understanding the disease prognosis to initiate research for new drug targets and thus development of new drugs. As drug development is complex and expensive process, in silico drug development can aid in this regard by reducing time, effort and capital for the quest of a “better drug” for such neglected diseases. Recent knowledge about the genome and proteome has increased enthusiasm for the quest of new drug targets. One such potential target can be lipases which are involved in the lipid metabolism of pathogens. Lipases of pathogens have multitude of functions in many patho-physiological processes including virulence, transmission, life cycle development, modulation of host lipids and host immune responses. Thus the aim of this review is to describe the significance of lipases in the life cycle and pathogenesis of the pathogen and whether they can be used as drug targets. The development of research in this direction has also been brought forward. This may help in finding new drug targets for neglected disease.

One of the most neglected disease is the Sleeping sickness or Human African Trypanosomiasis (HAT), which is mostly restricted to poor regions of Africa. The disease is caused by parasitic infection with Trypanosoma brucei (T. brucei), and is acquired through the bite of the tsetse fly. In the first stage of the disease, the parasite is in the blood, but in stage 2, the infective form reaches the brain, causing great weakness and death. The few existing drugs against this infection, are highly toxic, and can cause the emergence of resistant forms of the parasite. Also, these drugs are not readily available. New drugs are needed. Many researchers are investigating new enzyme targets for the parasite, searching for more efficient and selective inhibitors that are capable to cause the parasite death with less toxicity to the host. Trypanothione reductase, farnesyl diphosphate synthase, 6-phospho-gluconate dehydrogenase, and UDP 4'-galactose epimerase are some of the enzymes involved in the studies reported on this review. In addition, we have applied ligandbased- virtual screening, using Random Forest associated with structure-based-virtual screening (docking), to a small dataset of 225 alkaloids from the Menispermaceae family (in-house data bank). The aim of this study is to select structures with potential inhibitory activity against trypanothione reductase from Trypanosoma brucei. The computer-aided drug design study selected certain alkaloids that might be worth further investigation.

Malaria is one of the main infectious diseases in tropical developing countries and represents high morbidity and mortality rates nowadays. The principal etiological agent P. falciparum is transmitted through the bite of the female Anopheles mosquito. The issue has escalated due to the emergence of resistant strains to most of the antimalarials used for the treatment including Chloroquine, Sulfadoxine-Pyrimethamine, and recently Artemisinin derivatives, which has led to diminished effectiveness and by consequence increased the severity of epidemic outbreaks. Due to the lack of effective compounds to treat these drug-resistant strains, the discovery or development of novel anti-malaria drugs is important. In this context, one strategy has been to find inhibitors of enzymes, which play an important role for parasite survival. Today, promising results have been obtained in this regard, involving the entire P. falciparum metabolism. These inhibitors could serve as leads in the search of a new chemotherapy against malaria. This review focuses on the achievements in recent years with regard to inhibition of enzymes used as targets for drug design against malaria.

Malaria, a deadly infectious parasitic disease, is a major issue of public health in the world today and already produces serious economic constraints in the endemic countries. Most of the malarial infections and deaths are due to Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax species. The recent emergence of resistance necessitates the search for new antimalarial drugs, which overcome the resistance and act through new mechanisms. Although much effort has been directed towards the discovery of novel antimalarial drugs. 4-anilino quinolone triazines as potent antimalarial agents, their in silico modelling and bioevaluation as Plasmodium falciparum transketolase and β-hematin inhibitors has been reported. This review is primarily focused on the drug discovery of the recent advances in the development of antimalarial agents and their mechanism of action.

Metabolic pathways that extract energy from carbon compounds are essential for an organism’s survival. Therefore, inhibition of enzymes in these pathways represents a potential therapeutic strategy to combat parasitic infections. However, the high degree of similarity between host and parasite enzymes makes this strategy potentially difficult. Nevertheless, several existing drugs to treat infections by parasitic helminths (worms) target metabolic enzymes. These include the trivalent antimonials that target phosphofructokinase and Clorsulon that targets phosphoglycerate mutase and phosphoglycerate kinase. Glycolytic enzymes from a variety of helminths have been characterised biochemically, and some inhibitors identified. To date none of these inhibitors have been developed into therapies. Many of these enzymes are externalised from the parasite and so are also of interest in the development of potential vaccines. Less work has been done on tricarboxylic acid cycle enzymes and oxidative phosphorylation complexes. Again, while some inhibitors have been identified none have been developed into drug-like molecules. Barriers to the development of novel drugs targeting metabolic enzymes include the lack of experimentally determined structures of helminth enzymes, lack of direct proof that the enzymes are vital in the parasites and lack of cell culture systems for many helminth species. Nevertheless, the success of Clorsulon (which discriminates between highly similar host and parasite enzymes) should inspire us to consider making serious efforts to discover novel anthelminthics, which target metabolic enzymes.