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Biomedical subjects

Stephen D Pickett

Publications and source records attributed to Stephen D Pickett.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Discovery of novel low molecular weight inhibitors of IMPDH via virtual needle screening.

Novel, low molecular weight inhibitors of IMPDH have been discovered through the application of a validated virtual screening protocol. A series of 21 IMPDH inhibitors were used to validate the docking procedure. Application of this procedure to the selection of compounds for screening from an in-house database resulted in a 50-fold reduction in the size of the screening set (3425 to 74 compounds) and gave a hit-rate of 10% on biological evaluation.

Binding Sites↗

An algorithm-directed two-component library synthesized via solid-phase methodology yielding potent and orally bioavailable p38 MAP kinase inhibitors.

Previously we reported the identification of RPR200765A, a potent orally bioavailable pyridine-imidazole inhibitor of p38 mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase which suppressed paw swelling and joint pathology in streptococcal cell wall-induced arthritis. Herein, we report the use of solid-phase combinatorial organic synthesis for the parallel processing of a related pyrimidine-imidazole-based library with two points of structural variability. We report also that the application of a computer algorithm, the Monte Carlo Monomer Selection, maximized both the combinatorial synthetic efficiency and the bioavailability of the final compounds. In conjunction with the synthetic protocols, the polymer-supported quench technique was applied to the purification of the final compounds. Through rapid evaluation of the library using a p38 kinase assay and permeability assays, it was possible to identify a number of potent and orally bioavailable p38 MAP kinase inhibitors suitable for further biological investigation.

Administration, Oral↗

Optimizing the size and configuration of combinatorial libraries.

This paper addresses a major issue in library design, namely how to efficiently optimize the library size (number of products) and configuration (number of reagents at each position) simultaneously with other properties such as diversity, cost, and drug-like physicochemical property profiles. These objectives are often in competition, for example, minimizing the number of reactants while simultaneously maximizing diversity, and thus present difficulties for traditional optimization methods such as genetic algorithms and simulated annealing. Here, a multiobjective genetic algorithm (MOGA) is used to vary library size and configuration simultaneously with other library properties. The result is a family of solutions that explores the tradeoffs in the objectives. This is achieved without the need to assign relative weights to the objectives. The user is then able to make an informed choice on an appropriate compromise solution. The method has been applied to two different virtual libraries: a two-component aminothiazole library and a four-component benzodiazepine library.

Journal Article↗