A Prospective Virtual Screening Study: Enriching Hit Rates and Designing Focus Libraries To Find Inhibitors of PI3Kδ and PI3Kγ

Here, we report a high-throughput virtual screening (HTVS) study using phosphoinositide 3-kinase (both PI3K gamma and PI3K delta). Our initial HTVS results of the Janssen corporate database identified small focused libraries with hit rates at 50% inhibition showing a SO-fold increase over those from a HTS (high-throughput screen). Further, applying constraints based on chemically intuitive hydrogen bonds and/or positional requirements resulted in a substantial improvement in the hit rates (versus no constraints) and reduced docking time. While we find that docking scoring functions are not capable of providing a reliable relative ranking of a set of compounds, a prioritization of groups of compounds (e.g., low, medium, and high) does emerge, which allows for the chemistry efforts to be quickly focused on the most viable candidates. Thus, this illustrates that it is not always necessary to have a high correlation between a computational score and the experimental data to impact the drug discovery process.