Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 17, Issue 1, 2017

The targeting of non-catalytic cysteine residues with small molecules is drawing increased attention from drug discovery scientists and chemical biologists. From a biological perspective, genomic and proteomic studies have revealed the presence of cysteine mutations in several oncogenic proteins, suggesting both a functional role for these residues and also a strategy for targeting them in an ‘allele specific’ manner. For th Read More

The Ras superfamily of small monomeric GTPases includes some of the most prominent cancer targets for which no selective therapeutic agent has yet been successfully developed. The turn of the millennium saw a resurgence of efforts to target these enzymes using new and improved biophysical techniques to overcome the perceived difficulties of insurmountably high affinity for guanosine nucleotides and flat, flexible t Read More

Structure based design has been widely used in many drug development programs. In parallel with the evolution of high performance computing systems and versatile molecular modeling programs, structure based drug design has become indispensible in many research areas. CYP51 is a proven therapeutic target for anti-fungal drugs. While anti-fungal drugs targeting CYP51 have a long history and a large pool of anti-fun Read More

The family of adenosine receptors (ARs) is focus of several medicinal chemistry programs aimed to find new potent and selective drugs. Each receptor subtype has been proposed as a relevant drug target in the treatment of, e.g., cardiovascular or inflammatory diseases, asthma or Parkinson’s disease. Until recently, most of these efforts have been dominated by ligand-based or empirical approaches. However, the l Read More

The need for novel approaches for targeting well-known protein families in drug discovery has been discussed for several years. There is a huge amount of literature on the inhibition of kinases with small molecules targeting the ATP site, and as a result of this extensive research, there are a large number of kinase inhibitors in the clinic. However, even though the idea of targeting other sites on kinases is not new, relatively litt Read More

Class C G protein-coupled receptors encompass a range of promising therapeutic targets for a variety of diseases, yet to date only two members of this sub-family of GPCRs have been drugged. Recent advances in structural biology have revealed the X-ray crystallographic structures of allosteric ligands bound to two Class C metabotropic glutamate (mGlu) receptors, mGlu1 and mGlu5. Herein, we review how this information can Read More

Since the recent renaissance of phenotypic screening in the field of protozoan drug discovery, is there still an opportunity for the structure-based design of new anti-protozoan agents? Target-based approaches should be used in parallel to phenotypic screening to strengthen the pipeline of anti-protozoan agents. We give an overview of the protozoan drug discovery landscape highlighting four protein targets of interest: cyto Read More