In Silico Structure-Based Approach for Group Efficiency Estimation in Fragment-Based Drug Design Using Evaluation of Fragment Contributions

The notion of a contribution of a specific group in an organic molecule's property and/or activity is both common in our thinking and is still not strictly correct due to the inherent non-additivity of free energy with respect to molecular fragments composing a molecule. The fragment- based drug discovery (FBDD) approach has proven to be fruitful in addressing the above notions. The main difficulty of the FBDD, however, is in its reliance on the low throughput and expensive experimental means of determining the fragment-sized molecules binding. In this article we propose a way to enhance the throughput and availability of the FBDD methods by judiciously using an in silico means of assessing the contribution to ligand-receptor binding energy of fragments of a molecule under question using a previously developed in silico Reverse Fragment Based Drug Discovery (R-FBDD) approach. It has been shown that the proposed structure-based drug discovery (SBDD) type of approach fills in the vacant niche among the existing in silico approaches, which mainly stem from the ligand-based drug discovery (LBDD) counterparts. In order to illustrate the applicability of the approach, our work retrospectively repeats the findings of the use case of an FBDD hit-to-lead project devoted to the experimentally based determination of additive group efficiency (GE)-an analog of ligand efficiency (LE) for a group in the molecule-using the Free-Wilson (FW) decomposition. It is shown that in using our in silico approach to evaluate fragment contributions of a ligand and to estimate GE one can arrive at similar decisions as those made using the experimentally determined activity-based FW decomposition. It is also shown that the approach is rather robust to the choice of the scoring function, provided the latter demonstrates a decent scoring power. We argue that the proposed approach of in silico assessment of GE has a wider applicability domain and expect that it will be widely applicable to enhance the net throughput of drug discovery based on the FBDD paradigm.

Automated summary

The article proposes a way to enhance the throughput and availability of the fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD) methods by using an in silico approach to assess the contribution of molecular fragments to ligand-receptor binding energy. The proposed approach has been shown to have a wider applicability domain and can result in similar decisions as those made using experimental methods. The method is also robust to the choice of a scoring function with decent scoring power.