Combinatorial Chemistry & High Throughput Screening - Volume 15, Issue 8, 2012

History rarely witnesses the emergence of personalities whose monumental achievements change the course of science and technology in a country. Prof. Atta-ur-Rahman FRS, is one of such outstanding personalities whose contributions are multi-dimensional. For over half a century, he advanced our understanding of natural products and bioorganic chemistry, and inspired several generations of young scientists to choose these branches of chemical science as their future endeavors. From a humble beginning of independent research in an institution of a developing country, he advanced to capture the attention of the world's natural product and medicinal chemistry communities with his seminal discoveries and his excellent leadership. He mentored a large number of young scholars from all over the world. Thus his enthusiasm for research and learning has spread globally. His research journey began with the development of synthetic approaches to complex anti-tumor alkaloids. He discovered over a thousand natural products, many of which proved to be novel with exciting biological properties. Around 850 publications, 25 international patents and over 114 books, published by major international publishers, are evidence to his enormous contributions in the field of natural products. The contributions of Prof. Atta-ur-Rahman go beyond his achievements in the field of chemical sciences. His leadership as the Federal Minister for Science and Technology, Information Technology and Higher Education of Pakistan, during 2000-2008 has completely changed the landscape of higher education in Pakistan. This included a significant increase in the number of universities from 57 to 137, tripling of the students' enrolment from 257,000 to 810,000, increasing the national research output from 600 publications annually to 5,000 publications annually and raising university standards so much so that several universities in Pakistan are now ranked among the top 400 in the world. His work has received universal recognition and for this, he was honored with numerous awards and honorary doctorate degrees by many universities including the University of Cambridge. He is also the only scientist from the Islamic world to have been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society (London) in recognition of research work carried out within an Islamic country in the 350 years old history of the Royal Society. Prof. Rahman is the first scientist from the Muslim world to have won the prestigious UNESCO Science Prize (1999) in the 35 year-old history of the Prize. He was elected Honorary Life Fellow of Kings College, Cambridge University, UK in 2007. Prof. Atta-ur-Rahman was conferred the TWAS (The Academy of sciences for Developing World) Prize for Institution Building in Durban, South Africa in 2009 in recognition of his contributions for bringing about revolutionary changes in the higher education sector in Pakistan. The Austrian government also honoured him with its highest civil award (“Grosse Goldene Ehrenzeischen am Bande”) (2007) in recognition of his eminent contributions....

Since antiquity, humans have used body fluids like saliva, urine and sweat for the diagnosis of diseases. The amount, color and smell of body fluids are still used in many traditional medical practices to evaluate an illness and make a diagnosis. The development and application of analytical methods for the detailed analysis of body fluids has led to the discovery of numerous disease biomarkers. Recently, mass spectrometry (MS), nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), and multivariate statistical techniques have been incorporated into a multidisciplinary approach to profile changes in small molecules associated with the onset and progression of human diseases. The goal of these efforts is to identify metabolites that are uniquely correlated with a specific human disease in order to accurately diagnose and treat the malady. In this review we will discuss recent developments in sample preparation, experimental techniques, the identification and quantification of metabolites, and the chemometric tools used to search for biomarkers of human diseases using NMR.

The genus Flemingia Roxb. et Ait. (Leguminosae) has been used for disease prevention and therapy in China since ancient times. So the material basis of the pharmacological activity in the genus Flemingia should be clear for how to use this kind of traditional Chinese medicines more reasonably in pharmacology. Therefore, this review gives an account of the current knowledge on the chemical constituents, biological activities and pharmacological properties of the plants of the genus. Several different classes of compounds were previously isolated, which the main groups are flavones, particularly prenylated flavones, and triterpenes accompanied with sterols, anthraquinones, and others. The names and structures of the chemical constituents are given in this review. In addition, the pharmacological effects of the extracts and individual compounds (mainly for flavones) derived from the genus plants have been found, including neuroprotection, anti-inflammation, anti-oxidation, cytotoxicity, hormone-like effects, antimicrobial activities, and so on.

β3 Adrenergic receptor (β3-AR), is a potential therapeutic target for the treatment of type II diabetes and obesity. We report the identification of novel compounds as β3-AR agonists by integrating different approaches of energetic analysis, structure based pharmacophore designing and virtual screening. In a step wise filtering protocol, structure based virtual screening of 2,33,450 compounds was done. These molecules were docked into the active site of the receptor utilizing three levels of accuracy; ligands passing the HTVS (high throughput virtual screening) step were subsequently analyzed in Glide SP (Standard Precision) and finally in Glide XP (Extra Precision) to estimate the receptor ligand binding affinities. In the second step a total of 300 pharmacophore hypotheses were generated from a set of known and diverse β3-AR agonists. The best hypothesis showed six features: three hydrogen bond acceptors, one positively charged group, and two aromatic rings. To cross validate, pharmacophore filtering was done on the set of shortlisted compounds from structure based VS (virtual screening). The different screening techniques employed were validated using enrichment factor calculations. The energetic based Pharmacophore performed fairly well at distinguishing active from the inactive compounds and yielded a greater diversity of active molecules whereas the number of actives retrieved in the case of structure based screening was the highest.

The incorporation of targeted agents has considerably improved the management of patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) over the last years. The main targets include the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). Currently available agents with established role in NSCLC include the anti-EGFR tyrosine-kinase inhibitors (TKIs) erlotinib/gefitinib and the anti-VEGF monoclonal antibody bevacizumab. Moreover, several other agents targeting critical pathways in lung carcinogenesis are currently under preclinical or clinical evaluation. This review presents an update on the role of targeted agents in advanced NSCLC. In addition, we present the main clinical studies investigating the activity of these agents in NSCLC and we provide recent data with respect to future therapeutic strategies.

Embryonic stem cells, due to their self-renewal and pluripotency properties, can be used to repair damaged tissues and as an unlimited source of differentiated cells. Although stem cells represent an important opportunity for cell based therapy and small molecules screening (in the context of drug or target discovery) many drawbacks are still preventing their widespread use. One of the most significant limitations is related to the complexity, as well as the reliability, of current protocols driving stem cells into any homogeneously differentiated cellular population. In this respect there is a strong demand for molecular agents promoting differentiation and thereby enabling robust, efficient and safe production of differentiated cells. In order to identify novel molecules that enhance early stages of differentiation, we developed an image based high content screening (HCS) approach using human embryonic stem cells (hESC). In our approach, we took advantage of custom image mining software specifically adapted for the selection of stem cell differentiation agents and the rejection of false positive hits. As a proof of concept ∼3500 small molecules originating from commercial libraries were screened and a number of molecules of interests were identified. These molecules show stem cell differentiation properties comparable to the phenotypic signature obtained with the reference compound retinoic acid.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) is the principal pathogen which causes tuberculosis (TB), a disease that remains as one of the most alarming health problems worldwide. An active area for the search of new anti-TB therapies is concerned with the use of computational approaches based on Chemoinformatics and/or Bioinformatics toward the discovery of new and potent anti-TB agents. These approaches consider only small series of structurally related compounds and the studies are generally realized for only one target like a protein. This fact constitutes an important limitation. The present work is an effort to overcome this problem. We introduce here the first chemo-bioinformatic approach by developing a multi-target (mt) QSAR discriminant model, for the in silico design and virtual screening of anti-TB agents against six proteins in MTB. The mt-QSAR model was developed by employing a large and heterogeneous database of compounds and substructural descriptors. The model correctly classified more than 90% of active and inactive compounds in both, training and prediction series. Some fragments were extracted from the molecules and their contributions to anti-TB activity through inhibition of the six proteins, were calculated. Several fragments were identified as responsible for anti-TB activity and new molecular entities were designed from those fragments with positive contributions, being suggested as possible anti-TB agents.

The application of factor analysis (FA) method in classification of the antitumor acridinones based on highperformance liquid chromatography (HPLC) retention data and calculated parameters of lipophilicity as well as some nonempirical structural parameters was studied. First, a group of 19 acridinone (imidazoacridinone and triazoloacridinone) derivatives was chromatographed in six RP-HPLC systems, and the values of their HPLC retention data as retention' times determined in both 10 min and 30 min gradient times were obtained as well as log kw (retention factor log k extrapolated to 0% organic modifier) parameters using DryLab program were calculated. Additionally, molecular modeling studies were performed based on the structural formula of considered acridinones and structural descriptors were derived as well as log P parameters using some commonly available software were calculated and subsequently used. A matrix of 19 x 32 HPLC data together with log P data and molecular properties parameters was subjected to factor analysis and led to extract three main factors with eigenvalues higher than 1. The first principal component (factor 1) accounted for, by 80.87% of the variance in data, the second principal component (factor 2) explained 7.77% and the third principal component (factor 3) was responsible by 4.46% of data variance. The total data variance was at the level 93.09% and was explained by the first three principal components. Moreover, one of the most significant influences on the values of factor 1 and factor 2 possessed HPLC retention data and calculated parameters describing lipophilicity, respectively. More importantly, distribution of individual drugs on the plane determined by two principal components produced patterns in good agreement with their chemical structures as well as with their antitumor activity.