Gennady Poda

Ontario Institute for Cancer Research · Drug Discovery

Proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) have been explored for the degradation of drug targets, particularly undruggable proteins, for more than two decades. They have been employed by various groups successfully, however only a handful of E3 ligase substrate receptors such as CRBN, VHL, MDM2, and IAP have been efficiently used. Downregulation and...

In the ligand prediction category of CASP15, the challenge was to predict the positions and conformations of small molecules binding to proteins that were provided as amino acid sequences or as models generated by the AlphaFold2 program. For most targets, we used our template-based ligand docking program ClusPro ligTBM, also implemented as a public...

The design of PROteolysis-TArgeting Chimeras (PROTACs) requires bringing an E3 ligase into proximity with a target protein to modulate the concentration of the latter through its ubiquitination and degradation. Here, we present a method for generating high-accuracy structural models of E3 ligase-PROTAC-target protein ternary complexes. The method i...

DCAF1 is a substrate receptor of two distinct E3 ligases (CRL4DCAF1 and EDVP), plays a critical physiological role in protein degradation, and is considered a drug target for various cancers. Antagonists of DCAF1 could be used toward the development of therapeutics for cancers and viral treatments. We used the WDR domain of DCAF1 to screen a 114-bi...

B cell lymphoma 6 (BCL6), a highly regulated transcriptional repressor, is deregulated in several forms of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), most notably in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL). The activities of BCL6 are dependent on protein-protein interactions with transcriptional co-repressors. To find new therapeutic interventions addressing the ne...

While coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) begins as a respiratory infection, it progresses as a systemic disease involving multiorgan microthromboses that underly the pathology. SARS-CoV-2 enters host cells via attachment to the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor. ACE2 is widely expressed in a multitude of tissues, including the lung (...

The nuclear receptor peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor alpha (PPAR) is emerging as an important target in the brain for the treatment or prevention of cognitive disorders. The identification of high-affinity ligands for brain PPAR may reveal the mechanisms underlying the synaptic effects of this receptor and facilitate drug development....

Metabolic diseases are increasing at staggering rates globally. The peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARα/ γ/δ) are fatty acid sensors that help mitigate imbalances between energy uptake and utilization. Herein, we report compounds derived from phenolic lipids present in cashew nut shell liquid (CNSL), an abundant waste byproduct, in a...

RBBP4 is a nuclear WD40 motif-containing protein widely implicated in various cancers and a putative drug target. It interacts with multiple proteins within diverse complexes such as nucleosome remodeling and deacetylase (NuRD) complex and polycomb repressive complex 2 (PRC2), as well as histone H3 and H4 through two distinct binding sites. B-cell...

Activating mutations in the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) are common driver mutations in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). First, second and third generation EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) are effective at inhibiting mutant EGFR NSCLC, however, acquired resistance is a major issue, leading to disease relapse. Here, we characteri...

Both previous and additional genetic knockdown studies reported herein implicate G protein-coupled receptor kinase 6 (GRK6) as a critical kinase required for the survival of multiple myeloma (MM) cells. Therefore, we sought to develop a small molecule GRK6 inhibitor as an MM therapeutic. From a focused library of known kinase inhibitors, we identif...

Chemical probes are potent and selective small-molecule modulators of cellular functions that allow interrogation of the function of the protein with which they interact. Just like in drug discovery, the holy grail of computational chemical probe discovery is the accurate prediction of how chemical probes interact with their protein targets and als...

The RAF family kinases function in the RAS–ERK pathway to transmit signals from activated RAS to the downstream kinases MEK and ERK. This pathway regulates cell proliferation, differentiation and survival, enabling mutations in RAS and RAF to act as potent drivers of human cancers. Drugs targeting the prevalent oncogenic mutant BRAF(V600E) have sho...

There are currently no effective chemotherapeutic drugs approved for the treatment of diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), an aggressive pediatric cancer resident in the pons region of the brainstem. Radiation therapy is beneficial but not curative, with the condition being uniformly fatal. Analysis of the genomic landscape surrounding DIPG has...

Receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs) are transmembrane receptors of great clinical interest due to their role in disease. Historically, therapeutics targeting RTKs have been identified using in vitro kinase assays. Due to frequent development of drug resistance, however, there is a need to identify more diverse compounds that inhibit mutated but not wi...

Background Tuberculosis (TB) is an infection disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) bacteria. One of the main causes of mortality from TB is the problem of Mtb resistance to known drugs. Objective The goal of this work is to identify potent small molecule anti-TB agents by machine learning, synthesis and biological evaluation. Method...

The transcription factor B cell lymphoma 6 (BCL6) is required for the generation of an effective humoral immune response through the development and maintenance of germinal centers (GCs). The inhibition of the protein−protein interaction between BCL6 and its corepressors has been implicated as a therapeutic target for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma...

Boronic acids have attracted the attention of synthetic and medicinal chemists due to boron’s ability to modulate enzyme function. Recently, we demonstrated that boron-containing amphoteric building blocks facilitate the discovery of bioactive aminoboronic acids. Herein, we have augmented this capability with a de novo library design and virtural s...

Background Aberrant kallikrein activity is observed in a number of inflammatory dermatoses. Up-regulation of kallikrein-5 (KLK5) activity leads to uncontrolled skin desquamation and cleavage of proteinase-activated receptor-2 (PAR2), causing the release of pro-inflammatory cytokines and disruption of epidermal barrier function. This study aimed to...

Boronic acids have attracted the attention of synthetic and medicinal chemists due to boron's ability to modulate enzyme function. Recently, we demonstrated that boron-containing amphoteric building blocks facilitate the discovery of bioactive aminoboronic acids. Herein, we have augmented this capability with a de novo library design and virtural s...

p> Boronic acids have attracted the attention of synthetic and medicinal chemists due to boron’s ability to modulate enzyme function. Recently, we demonstrated that boron-containing amphoteric building blocks facilitate the discovery of bioactive aminoboronic acids. Herein, we have augmented this capability with a de novo library design and virtura...

Eleven-nineteen leukemia (ENL) contains an epigenetic reader domain (YEATS domain) that recognizes lysine acylation on histone 3 and facilitates transcription initiation and elongation through its interactions with the super elongation complex (SEC) and the histone methyl transferase DOT1L. Although it has been known for its role as a fusion protei...

YEATS domain (YD) containing proteins are an emerging class of epigenetic targets in drug discovery. Dysregulation of these modified lysine binding proteins has been linked to the onset and progression of cancers. We herein report the discovery and characterisation of the first small molecule chemical probe, SGC‐iMLLT, for the YD of MLLT1 (ENL/YEAT...

YEATS domain (YD) containing proteins are an emerging class of epigenetic targets in drug discovery. Dysregulation of these modified lysine binding proteins has been linked to the onset and progression of cancers. We herein report the discovery and characterisation of the first small molecule chemical probe, SGC‐iMLLT, for the YD of MLLT1 (ENL/YEAT...

p>YEATS domain (YD) containing proteins are an emerging class of epigenetic targets in drug discovery. Dysregulation of these modified lysine binding proteins has been linked to the onset and progression of cancers. We herein report the discovery and characterisation of the first small molecule chemical probe, SGC-iMLLT, for the YD of MLLT1 (ENL/Y...

Multiple myeloma (MM) is one of the most common hematological malignancies, but current therapeutic options are limited to high-dose chemotherapy or high-risk stem-cell transplantation. In a kinome-wide RNAi study by Tiedemann and colleagues (2010), the G-protein coupled receptor kinase GRK6 was identified as a critical kinase required for survival...

The problem of designing new anti-tubercular drugs against multiple-drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) was addressed using advanced machine learning methods. Since there are only few published measurements against MDR-TB, we collected a large literature dataset and developed models against the non-resistant H37Rv strain. The predictive accuracy o...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a chronic neurodegenerative disease affecting more than 30 million people worldwide. Development of small molecule inhibitors of human β-secretase 1 (hBACE-1) is being the focus of pharmaceutical industry for the past 15-20 years. Here, we successfully applied multiple ligand-based in silico modeling techniques to unders...

Acid sphingomyelinase (ASM) is a lysosomal phosphodiesterase that catalyzes the hydrolysis of sphingomyelin to produce ceramide and phosphocholine. While other lysosomal sphingolipid hydrolases require a saposin activator protein for full activity, the ASM polypeptide incorporates a built-in N-terminal saposin domain and does not require an externa...

Automated docking is one of the most important tools for structure-based drug design that allows prediction of ligand binding poses and also provides an estimate of how well small molecules fit in the binding site of a protein. A new scoring function based on AutoDock and AutoDock Vina has been introduced. The new hybrid scoring function is a linea...

WD repeat-containing protein 5 (WDR5) is an important component of the multiprotein complex essential for activating mixed-lineage leukemia 1 (MLL1). Rearrangement of the MLL1 gene is associated with onset and progression of acute myeloid and lymphoblastic leukemias, and targeting the WDR5-MLL1 interaction may result in new cancer therapeutics. Our...

A strategy for the synthesis of novel boron-containing bis(heteroaryl) systems is outlined.

His specialities include computer-aided drug design covering all aspects of modern computational drug discovery: structure-, ligand-and fragment-based drug discovery, cheminformatics, data mining and analysis, physical and ADMET (absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicity) property prediction. Poda has used his strong background i...

Herein, we describe the bromomethyl acyl boronate linchpin-an enabling reagent for the condensation-driven assembly of novel bis(heteroaryl) motifs. This building block is readily accessible from commercially available starting materials. A variety of 2-amino- and 2-methylpyridines were reacted with MIDA-protected bromomethyl acylboronate to afford...

Here we report a novel, fast and efficient algorithm for variable selection, the batch pruning algorithm (BPA). The method combines the artificial neural networks (ANN) ensemble learning and self-organized map (SOM) of Kohonen for clustering of descriptors, followed up with a selection of an optimal smaller subset of descriptors from each cluster b...

Molecular docking of small molecules in the protein binding sites is the most widely used computational technique in modern structure-based drug discovery. Although accurate prediction of binding modes of small molecules can be achieved in most cases, estimation of their binding affinities remains mediocre at best. As an attempt to improve the corr...

The CEBPA gene is mutated in 9% of patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Selective expression of a short (30-kDa) CCAAT-enhancer binding protein-α (C/EBPα) translational isoform, termed p30, represents the most common type of CEBPA mutation in AML. The molecular mechanisms underlying p30-mediated transformation remain incompletely understood....

Tissue kallikreins are a family of fifteen secreted serine proteases encoded by the largest protease gene cluster in the human genome. In the past decade, substantial progress has been made in characterizing the natural substrates, endogenous inhibitors and in vivo functions of kallikreins, and studies have delineated important pathophysiological r...

Endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress activates the unfolded protein response and its dysfunction is linked to multiple diseases. The stress transducer IRE1α is a transmembrane kinase endoribonuclease (RNase) that cleaves mRNA substrates to re-establish ER homeostasis. Aromatic ring systems containing hydroxy-aldehyde moieties, termed hydroxy-aryl-alde...

Molecular field topology analysis, scaffold hopping, and molecular docking were used as complementary computational tools for the design of repellents for Aedes aegypti, the insect vector for yellow fever, chikungunya, and dengue fever. A large number of analogues were evaluated by virtual screening with Glide molecular docking software. This produ...

The universally conserved Kae1/Qri7/YgjD and Sua5/YrdC protein families have been implicated in growth, telomere homeostasis, transcription and the N6-threonylcarbamoylation (t(6)A) of tRNA, an essential modification required for translational fidelity by the ribosome. In bacteria, YgjD orthologues operate in concert with the bacterial-specific pro...

The WD40-repeat protein WDR5 plays a critical role in maintaining the integrity of MLL complexes and fully activating their methyltransferase function. MLL complexes, the trithorax-like family of SET1 methyltransferases, catalyze trimethylation of lysine 4 on histone 3, and they have been widely implicated in various cancers. Antagonism of WDR5 and...

Protein methyltransferases (PMTs) are a novel gene family of therapeutic relevance involved in chromatin-mediated signaling and other biological mechanisms. Most PMTs are organized around the structurally conserved SET domain that catalyzes the methylation of a substrate lysine. A few potent chemical inhibitors compete with the protein substrate, a...

Bent but not broken: Cyclic oligoprolines are accessed in a reaction that effectively bends rigid oligoproline peptides (see scheme; TBDMS=tert-butyldimethylsilyl). The stitching is accomplished during macrocyclization enabled by aziridine aldehydes and isocyanides. Molecular modeling studies suggest that electrostatic attraction between the termin...

Multiple myeloma (MM) is one of the most common hematological malignancies, but current therapy options are limited to high-dose chemotherapy or high-risk stem-cell transplantation. In a recent kinome-wide RNAi study by Tiedemann and colleagues (2010), the G-protein coupled receptor kinase 6 (GRK6) was identified as a critical kinase required for s...

The WD40 protein, WDR5, is an essential component of the human trithorax-like family of SET1 methyltransferase complexes that carry out trimethylation of histone 3 lysine 4 (H3K4me3), play key roles in development, and are abnormally expressed in many cancers. Here we show that the interaction between WDR5 and peptides from the catalytic domain of...

The article presents a Web-based platform for collecting and storing toxicological structural alerts from literature and for virtual screening of chemical libraries to flag potentially toxic chemicals and compounds that can cause adverse side effects. An alert is uniquely identified by a SMARTS template, a toxicological endpoint, and a publication...

PRMT3, a protein arginine methyltransferase, has been shown to influence ribosomal biosynthesis by catalyzing the dimethylation of the 40S ribosomal protein S2. Although PRMT3 has been reported to be a cytosolic protein, it has been shown to methylate histone H4 peptide (H4 1-24) in vitro. Here, we report the identification of a PRMT3 inhibitor (1-...

Inositol-requiring enzyme 1 (IRE1) is a key player in endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress conditions. IRE1 is a highly conserved ER-membrane protein activated by the unfolded protein response (UPR) or other ER-stressors, such as hypoxia and glucose deprivation. Stress causes IRE1 to undergo oligomerization and autophosphorylation, which triggers nonc...

Installation of sites for metabolism in the lead compound PHA-767408 was the key focus of the IKK-2 inhaled program. This paper reports our efforts to identify a novel series of aminopyridinecarboxamide-based IKK-2 inhibitors, which display low nanomolar potency against IKK-2 with long duration of action (DOA), and metabolically labile to phase I a...

The work described herein demonstrates the utility of structure-based drug design (SBDD) in shifting the binding mode of an HTS hit from a DFG-in to a DFG-out binding mode resulting in a class of novel potent CSF-1R kinase inhibitors suitable for lead development.

NF-kappaB signaling plays a pivotal role in a variety of pathological conditions. Because of its central role in the overall NF-kappaB regulation, IKK-2 is a viable target for drug discovery. In order to enable structure-based design of IKK-2 inhibitors, we carried out a rational generation of IKK-2 mutants based on induced-fit docking of a selecti...

A large variety of log P calculation methods failed to produce sufficient accuracy in log P prediction for two in-house datasets of more than 96000 compounds contrary to their significantly better performances on public datasets. The minimum Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 1.02 and 0.65 were calculated for the Pfizer and Nycomed datasets, respect...

Optimization of kinase selectivity for a set of benzothiophene MK2 inhibitors provided analogs with potencies of less than 500 nM in a cell based assay. The selectivity of the inhibitors can be rationalized by examination of X-ray crystal structures of inhibitors bound to MK2.

Identification of potent benzothiophene inhibitors of mitogen activated protein kinase-activated protein kinase 2 (MK2), structure-activity relationship (SAR) studies, selectivity assessments against CDK2, cellular potency and mechanism of action are presented. Crystallographic data provide a rationale for the observed MK2 potency as well as select...

Prediction accuracy of in silico methods for physicochemical and ADMET properties of drugs is an actual matter of controversial discussions. With a particular concern on log P prediction methods, we discuss here, how understanding the limitations of methods, their applicability domains and their prediction accuracies, as well as the use of local mo...

We first review the state-of-the-art in development of log P prediction approaches falling in two major categories: substructure-based and property-based methods. Then, we compare the predictive power of representative methods for one public (N ¼ 266) and two in house datasets from Nycomed (N ¼ 882) and Pfizer (N ¼ 95809). A total of 30 and 18 meth...

We first review the state-of-the-art in development of log P prediction approaches falling in two major categories: substructure-based and property-based methods. Then, we compare the predictive power of representative methods for one public (N = 266) and two in house datasets from Nycomed (N = 882) and Pfizer (N = 95809). A total of 30 and 18 meth...

Theoretical quantifications of hydrogen bonding (HB) basicities and acidities, originally developed for aliphatic systems (J. Chem. Inf. Comput. Sci. 2004, 44, 1042-1055), are now extended to cover aromatic, heterocyclic, anionic, cationic and zwitter-ionic molecular fragments, thus encompassing a majority of druggable chemical space. The addition...

Multidrug resistance protein 2 (ABCC2/MRP2) is an ATP-binding cassette transporter involved in the absorption, distribution, and excretion of drugs and xenobiotics. Identifying compounds that are ABCC2/MRP2 substrates and/or inhibitors and understanding their structure-activity relationships (SARs) are important considerations in the selection and...

A new class of potent kinase inhibitors selective for mitogen-activated protein kinase-activated protein kinase 2 (MAPKAP-K2 or MK-2) for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis has been prepared and evaluated. These inhibitors have IC50 values as low as 10 nM against the target and have good selectivity profiles against a number of kinases including...

There have recently been developments in the methods used to access the accuracy of the prediction and applicability domain of absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicity models, and also in the methods used to predict the physicochemical properties of compounds in the early stages of drug development. The methods are classified in...

We describe the structure-based design, synthesis, and enzymatic activity of a series of substituted pyrazinones as inhibitors of the TF/VIIa complex. These inhibitors contain substituents meta to the P(1) amidine designed to explore additional interactions with the VIIa residues in the so-called 'S(1) side pocket'. A crystal structure of the desig...

We describe the structure-based design, synthesis, and enzymatic activity of a series of substituted pyrazinones as inhibitors of the TF/VIIa complex. These inhibitors contain substituents meta to the P-1 amidine designed to explore additional interactions with the Vila residues in the so-called 'S-1 side pocket'. A crystal structure of the designe...

Evaluation of the ALOGPS, ACD Labs LogD, and PALLAS PrologD suites to calculate the log D distribution coefficient resulted in high root-mean-squared error (RMSE) of 1.0-1.5 log for two in-house Pfizer's log D data sets of 17,861 and 640 compounds. Inaccuracy in log P prediction was the limiting factor for the overall log D estimation by these algo...

This chapter describes methods to develop opioid G protein-coupled receptors (GPCR) structural models for use in molecular docking and drug design. They are characterized by seven alpha helical transmembrane (TM) domains connected by three intracellular and three extracellular loops. The extracellular (EL) N-terminus and the intracellular (IL) C-te...

Transdermal therapy receives increasing attention as an attractive alternative to traditional drug delivery. Unfortunately the exact algorithm of transdermal permeation that could guide medicinal chemists towards delivery optimization at an early stage of the drug design process still remains to be decoded. This paper discusses some major hurdles o...

A series of 4-(N,N-diarylamino)piperidines are synthesized and evaluated for high affinity binding and selectivity to the delta-opioid receptor using a combination of 3D-QSAR and molecular docking techniques. Based on experimental ligand binding data to both mu- and delta- opioid receptors, CoMFA fields are generated and applied to identify potenti...

The opioid receptor like (ORL1) receptor is a G-protein coupled receptor superfamily, and regulates a plethora of neurophysiological functions. The structural requirements for receptor activation by its endogenous agonist, nociceptin (FGGFTGARKSARKLANQ), differ markedly from those of the kappa-opioid receptor and its putative peptide agonist, dynor...

Summary Human σ opioid receptor (σOR), a G-protein-coupled receptor, has been modeled using the helix axes as revealed by the crystallographic structure of bacteriorhodopsin and ligand binding profiles of single-point mutants of σOR. The model revealed feasibility of existence of a second disulfide bridge between the transmembrane helices (TMHs) 6...

Human δ opioid receptor (δOR), a G-protein-coupled receptor, has been modeled using the helix axes as revealed by the crystallographic structure of bacteriorhodopsin and ligand binding profiles of single-point mutants of δOR. The model revealed feasibility of existence of a second disulfide bridge between the transmembrane helices (TMHs) 6 and 7, C...

In the previous works [I-4] we noted that many substances inhibiting the signal transfer in Ca-mobilizing phospholipid (PL) signaling system, blocking the Ca-channels, and activating the adenylate cyclase (AdC) circuit (primarily by blocking the channel and reducing the regulation level) not only exhibit a number of like manifestations of the pharm...

Based on a set of compounds possessing hypolipidemic activity, it was demonstrated that evolutionary algorithms can be successfully used to compile an informative set of molecular parameters. The parameter sets selected using the method of potential functions allowed correct prediction of the activity of test molecules.

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Artificial neural networks were used to analyze and predict the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 reverse transcriptase inhibitors. The training and control sets included 44 molecules (most of them are well-known substances such as AZT, dde, etc.). The activities of the molecules were taken from literature. Topological indices were calculated and...

An effective system for predicting the inhibiting activity with respect to 5-lipoxygenase in a series of hydroxamic acids was developed. The bioactivity is predicted based on three selected topological indexes with one variation of the method of k-nearest neighbors. The system obtained is suitable for selecting the structures of new 5-lipoxygenase...

We have obtained an effective correlation equation describing the structure dependence of the activity of a number of hydroxy- and methoxy-substituted flavonoids as cAMP phosphodiesterase inhibitors. We propose an original modification of the Hopfinger method of pairwise molecular shape descriptors which uses two shape reference molecules. The data...

Model cellular systems which allowed evaluating the role of adenylcyclase (I) and Ca2+-mobilizing polyphosphoinositide (II) systems as a principal cascade of cellular signalling were used to study the nongenome mechanisms of cisplatin action. All the compounds studied inhibited cell responses controlled via cascade I inhibition adn cascade II activ...

The effect of the synthetic thrombin substrate (TAME) and three compounds exerting an opposite effect on Ca-PPI and AdC (caffeine, atropine and meta-tolyl derivative of mechlorethamine (TDM)) on hormone-like and catalytic functions of thrombin was studied. It is shown that both TAME and other drugs under test block effectively the thrombin-induced...

We investigated the applications of back propagation artificial neural networks (ANN) for a small dataset analysis in the field of structure-activity relationships. The derivatives of carboquinone were used as an example. It's been found that in this case the use of the same neural network results in unambiguous classification of new molecules. Pre...