Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 14, Issue 15, 2014

As the largest family of membrane-bound signal transduction proteins, G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) have been the focus of extensive research efforts over many years and the subject of thousands of publications and hundreds of reviews over the past several years alone [1-3]. Also referred to as G protein-linked receptors, serpentine receptors, heptahelical receptors and seven-transmembrane domain receptor Read More

There is mounting evidence from preclinical and early proof-of-concept studies suggesting that selective modulation of the M1 muscarinic receptor is efficacious in cognitive models of Alzheimer's disease (AD). A number of nonselective M1 muscarinic agonists have previously shown positive effects on cognitive function in AD patients, but were limited due to cholinergic adverse events thought to be mediated by pan activation Read More

Drug design necessitates a clear understanding of the phenotypic response to be elicited by a given ligandtarget interaction. This relationship is relatively well understood for classical biological targets of drug action, but for some novel targets, notably those amenable to allosteric modulation, developing such understanding may represent a more challenging task. In order to gain knowledge on the nature of the fun Read More

This review summarizes drug discovery efforts on mGluR2 positive allosteric modulators (PAMs) from 2000 to 2013. Medicinal chemistry programs and the identified 21 chemotypes are analyzed and compared in terms of their biological activity and ligand efficiency. Comparative analysis of ligand efficiency metrics including ligand efficiency and lipophilic ligand efficiency allowed us to identify the most promising chemotypes. Read More

Metabotropic glutamate receptor 5 (mGlu5) is a class C G-protein-coupled receptor which possesses a large extracellular N-terminal domain (ATD) connected to the seven-transmembrane (7-TM) domain. In contrast to the glutamate and its close analogs binding at the orthosteric site on the ATD region, allosteric modulators bind at topographically distinct sites in the 7-TM region. Activation of mGlu5 receptors at either the orthost Read More

G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) mediate a large number of biological pathways and are major therapeutic targets. One of the most exiting phenomena of GPCRs is their ability to interact with other GPCRs. GPCRGPCR interactions, also known as GPCR oligomerization, may create various functional entities such as homo- and heterodimers and also form complex multimeric GPCR clusters. In many biological systems, GPCR- Read More