Tia A Tummino, Christos Iliopoulos-Tsoutsouvas, Joao M Braz, Evan S O'Brien, Reed M Stein, Veronica Craik, Ngan K Tran, Suthakar Ganapathy, Fangyu Liu, Yuki Shiimura, Fei Tong, Thanh C Ho, Dmytro S Radchenko, Yurii S Moroz, Sian Rodriguez Rosado, Karnika Bhardwaj, Jorge Benitez, Yongfeng Liu, Herthana Kandasamy, Claire Normand, Meriem Semache, Laurent Sabbagh, Isabella Glenn, John J Irwin, Kaavya Krishna Kumar, Alexandros Makriyannis, Allan I Basbaum, Brian K Shoichet
Large library docking can reveal unexpected chemotypes that complement the structures of biological targets. Seeking new agonists for the cannabinoid-1 receptor (CB1R), we docked 74 million tangible molecules, prioritizing 46 high ranking ones for de novo synthesis and testing. Nine were active by radioligand competition, a 20% hit-rate. Structure-based optimization of one of the most potent of these (K i = 0.7 µM) led to '4042 , a 1.9 nM ligand and a full CB1R agonist. A cryo-EM structure of the purified enantiomer of '4042 ( '1350 ) in complex with CB1R-G i1 confirmed its docked pose...
January 23, 2024: bioRxiv