Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 13, Issue 7, 2013

Targeting drugs to the gastrointestinal tract has been and continues to be an active area of research. Guttargeting is an effective means of increasing the local concentration of active substance at the desired site of action while minimizing concentrations elsewhere in the body that could lead to unwanted side-effects. Several approaches to intestinal targeting exist. Physicochemical property manipulation can drive molecules to large, polar, low absorption space or alternatively to lipophilic, high clearance space in order to minimize systemic exposure. Design of compounds that are substrates for transporters within the gastrointestinal tract, either uptake or efflux, or at the hepato-biliary interface, may help to increase intestinal concentration. Prodrug strategies have been shown to be effective particularly for colon targeting, and several different technology formulation approaches are currently being researched. This review provides examples of various approaches to intestinal targeting, and discusses challenges and areas in need of future scientific advances.

Overproduction of nitric oxide by neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS) has been highly correlated with numerous neurodegenerative diseases and stroke. Given its role in human diseases, nNOS is an important target for therapy that deserves further attention. During the last decade, a large number of organic scaffolds have been investigated to develop selective nNOS inhibitors, resulting in two principal classes of compounds, 2-aminopyridines and thiophene-2- carboximidamides. The former compounds were investigated in detail by our group, exhibiting great potency and excellent selectivity; however, they suffer from poor bioavailability, which hampers their therapeutic potential. Here we present a review of various strategies adopted by our group to improve the bioavailability of 2-aminopyridine derivatives and describe recent advances in thiophene-2-carboximidamide based nNOS-selective inhibitors, which exhibit promising pharmacological profiles.

The focus of CNS drug pharmacokinetics programs has recently shifted from determining the total concentrations in brain and blood to considering also unbound fractions and concentrations. Unfortunately, assessing unbound brain exposure experimentally requires demanding in vivo and in vitro studies. We propose a physical model, based on lipid binding and pH partitioning, to predict in silico the unbound volume of distribution in the brain. The model takes into account the partition of a drug into lipids, interstitial fluid and intracellular compartments of the brain. The results are in good agreement with the experimental data, suggesting that the contributions of lipid binding and pH partitioning are important in determining drug exposure in brain. The predicted values are used, together with predictions for plasma protein binding, as corrective terms in a second model to derive the unbound brain to plasma concentration ratio starting from experimental values of total concentration ratio. The calculated values of brain free fraction and passive permeability are also used to qualitatively determine the brain to plasma equilibration time in a model that shows promising results but is limited to a very small set of compounds. The models we propose are a step forward in understanding and predicting pharmacologically relevant exposure in brain starting from compounds’ chemical structure and neuropharmacokinetics, by using experimental total brain to plasma ratios, in silico calculated properties and simple physics-based approaches. The models can be used in central nervous system drug discovery programs for a fast and cheap assessment of unbound brain exposure. For existing compounds, the unbound ratios can be derived from experimental values of total brain to plasma ratios. For both existing and hypothetical compounds, the unbound volume of distribution due to lipid binding and pH partitioning can be calculated starting only from the chemical structure.

The structural complexity of many natural products sets them apart from common synthetic drugs, allowing them to access a biological target space that lies beyond the enzyme active sites and receptors targeted by conventional small molecule drugs. Naturally occurring cyclic peptides, in particular, exhibit a wide variety of unusual and potent biological activities. Many of these compounds penetrate cells by passive diffusion and some, like the clinically important drug cyclosporine A, are orally bioavailable. These natural products tend to have molecular weights and polar group counts that put them outside the norm based on classic predictors of “drug-likeness”. Because of their size and complexity, cyclic peptides occupy a chemical “middle space” in drug discovery that may provide useful scaffolds for modulating more challenging biological targets such as protein-protein interactions and allosteric binding sites. However, the relationship between structure and pharmacokinetic (PK) behavior, especially cell permeability and metabolic clearance, in cyclic peptides has not been studied systematically, and the generality of cyclic peptides as orally bioavailable scaffolds remains an open question. This review focuses on cyclic peptide natural products from a “structure-PK” perspective, outlining what we know and don’t know about their properties in the hope of uncovering trends that might be useful in the design of novel “rule-breaking” molecules.

Essential nutrients are attractive targets for the transport of biologically active agents across cell membranes, since many are substrates for active cellular importation pathways. The sodium-dependent multivitamin transporter (SMVT) is among the best characterized of these, and biotin derivatives have been its most popular targets. We have surveyed 45 derivatives of pantothenic acid, another substrate of SMVT, long known as a competitive inhibitor of biotin transport. Variations of the β-alanyl fragment of pantothenate were uniformly rejected by the transporter, including derivatives with very similar steric and acidic characteristics to the natural substrate. The secondary hydroxyl of the 2,2- dimethyl-1,3-propanediol (pantoyl) fragment was the only position at which potential linkers could be attached while retaining activity as an inhibitor of biotin uptake and a substrate for sodium-dependent transport. However, triazole conjugates to several drug-like cargo motifs were not accepted as substrates by human SMVT in cell culture. Two compounds were observed which did not inhibit biotin uptake but were themselves transported in a sodium-dependent fashion, suggesting more complex behavior than expected. These studies represent the most extensive examination to date of pantothenate as an anchor for SMVT-mediated drug delivery, showing that this route requires further investigation before being judged promising.

Solute Carrier (SLC) transporters are membrane proteins that transport solutes, such as ions, metabolites, peptides, and drugs, across biological membranes, using diverse energy coupling mechanisms. In human, there are 386 SLC transporters, many of which contribute to the absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion of drugs and/or can be targeted directly by therapeutics. Recent atomic structures of SLC transporters determined by X-ray crystallography and NMR spectroscopy have significantly expanded the applicability of structure-based prediction of SLC transporter ligands, by enabling both comparative modeling of additional SLC transporters and virtual screening of small molecules libraries against experimental structures as well as comparative models. In this review, we begin by describing computational tools, including sequence analysis, comparative modeling, and virtual screening, that are used to predict the structures and functions of membrane proteins such as SLC transporters. We then illustrate the applications of these tools to predicting ligand specificities of select SLC transporters, followed by experimental validation using uptake kinetic measurements and other assays. We conclude by discussing future directions in the discovery of the SLC transporter ligands.

The tissue distribution of a drug can have significant impact on both its efficacy and safety. As a consequence, selective tissue targeting has become an attractive approach for optimizing the window between efficacy and safety for drug targets that are ubiquitously expressed and important in key physiological processes. Given the liver’s key role in metabolic regulation and the fact that it is the principal tissue affected by diseases such as hepatitis B and C viruses as well as hepatocellular carcinoma, designing drugs with hepatoselective distribution profiles is an important strategy in developing safe cardiovascular, metabolic, antiviral and oncology drug candidates. In this paper, we analyze a diverse set of compounds from four different projects within Pfizer that specifically pursued liver targeting strategies. A number of key in vitro and in vivo ADME endpoints were collected including in vivo tissue exposure, oral bioavailability, clearance in preclinical species and in vitro hepatic OATP uptake, in vitro rat liver microsomal stability, permeability, solubility, logD, and others. From this analysis, we determined a set of general structureliver- selectivity guides for designing orally bioavailable, liver-targeted candidates using liver specific OATP transporters. The guidelines have been formulated using straightforward molecular descriptors and in vitro properties that medicinal chemists routinely optimize. Our analysis emphasizes the need to focus on a chemical space with balanced lipophilicity, high aqueous solubility and low passive permeability in order to achieve the desired hepatoselectivity while maintaining fraction absorbed.