mimetic

Protein protein interactions (PPI) have pivotal roles in life processes. The studies showed that aberrant PPI are associated with various diseases. However, the design of modulators targeting PPI still faces tremendous challenges, such the difficult PPI interfaces for the drug design, lack of ligands reference, lack of guidance rules for the PPI modulators development and high-resolution PPI proteins structures.

The PPI Library comprises molecules of various sizes, frameworks, and shapes ranging from fragment-like entities to macrocyclic derivatives designed as secondary structure mimetics or as epitope mimetics. The designs cover β-turn / loop mimetics and α-helix mimetics. Since helices present at the interface in 62% of all protein-protein interactions. This library focused on designs including mimics with the substitution geometry of an a-helices, as well as designs that mimic the location of “hot-spot” side chains in helix-mediated PPIs.

Peptidomimetics are compounds whose essential elements (pharmacophore) mimic a natural peptide or protein in 3D space and which retain the ability to interact with the biological target and produce the same biological effect. Peptidomimetics are designed to circumvent some of the problems associated with a natural peptide: e.g. stability against proteolysis (duration of activity) and poor bioavailability. Certain other properties, such as receptor selectivity or potency, often can be substantially improved. The design and synthesis of peptidomimetics are most important because of the dominant position peptide and protein-protein interactions play in molecular recognition and signaling, especially in living systems. Hence mimics have great potential in drug discovery.

MCE Peptidomimetic Library contains 375 compounds including peptoid, α-helix mimetics, β-turn/sheets mimetics, etc. This library is an indispensable tool of structure-activity relationships in drug discovery.

Historically, natural products (NPs) have played a key role in drug discovery, especially for cancer and infectious diseases, but also in other therapeutic areas, including cardiovascular diseases (for example, statins) and multiple sclerosis (for example, fingolimod). Approximately 40 % of the drugs approved by the FDA during the last decades were natural products, their derivatives, or synthetic mimetics related to natural products.

MCE Natural Product-like Compound Library consists of 5,000 natural product-like compounds coming from a drug-like library. Each molecule contains scaffold of natural products or has a Tanimoto similarity coefficient greater than 0.6 with natural products, and natural-likeness scoring is more than -2. What’s more, compounds in the library are drug-like and readily available for re-supply, making it a powerful tool for new drug research and development. It can be widely applied in high-throughput screening (HTS) and high-content screening (HCS).