作者:Nathan J. Gesmundo、Bérengère Sauvagnat、Patrick J. Curran、Matthew P. Richards、Christine L. Andrews、Peter J. Dandliker、Tim Cernak
DOI:10.1038/s41586-018-0056-8
日期:2018.5
Most drugs are developed through iterative rounds of chemical synthesis and biochemical testing to optimize the affinity of a particular compound for a protein target of therapeutic interest. This process is challenging because candidate molecules must be selected from a chemical space of more than 1060 drug-like possibilities 1 , and a single reaction used to synthesize each molecule has more than 107 plausible permutations of catalysts, ligands, additives and other parameters 2 . The merger of a method for high-throughput chemical synthesis with a biochemical assay would facilitate the exploration of this enormous search space and streamline the hunt for new drugs and chemical probes. Miniaturized high-throughput chemical synthesis3â7 has enabled rapid evaluation of reaction space, but so far the merger of such syntheses with bioassays has been achieved with only low-density reaction arrays, which analyse only a handful of analogues prepared under a single reaction condition8â13. High-density chemical synthesis approaches that have been coupled to bioassays, including on-bead 14 , on-surface 15 , on-DNA 16 and mass-encoding technologies 17 , greatly reduce material requirements, but they require the covalent linkage of substrates to a potentially reactive support, must be performed under high dilution and must operate in a mixture format. These reaction attributes limit the application of transition-metal catalysts, which are easily poisoned by the many functional groups present in a complex mixture, and of transformations for which the kinetics require a high concentration of reactant. Here we couple high-throughput nanomole-scale synthesis with a label-free affinity-selection mass spectrometry bioassay. Each reaction is performed at a 0.1-molar concentration in a discrete well to enable transition-metal catalysis while consuming less than 0.05 milligrams of substrate per reaction. The affinity-selection mass spectrometry bioassay is then used to rank the affinity of the reaction products to target proteins, removing the need for time-intensive reaction purification. This method enables the primary synthesis and testing steps that are critical to the invention of protein inhibitors to be performed rapidly and with minimal consumption of starting materials. A system that combines nanoscale synthesis and affinity ranking enables high-throughput screening of reaction conditions and bioactivity for a given protein target, accelerating the process of drug discovery.
大多数药物都是通过反复的化学合成和生化测试来开发,以优化特定化合物与治疗感兴趣的蛋白质靶点的亲和力。这一过程颇具挑战性,因为候选分子必须从超过10^60种类药物可能性的化学空间中选出,而用于合成每个分子的单一反应中催化剂、配体、添加剂和其他参数的合理排列组合超过10^7种。将高通量化学合成方法与生化分析方法相结合,将有助于探索这一巨大的搜索空间,并简化新型药物和化学探针的寻找过程。微型化高通量化学合成技术已经能够快速评估反应空间,但迄今为止,这种合成方法与生物分析方法的结合,仅限于低密度反应阵列,即在单一反应条件下仅分析少量类似物。高密度化学合成方法与生物分析方法相结合,包括使用珠子上、表面上、DNA上和质量编码等技术,大大减少了材料需求,但这些方法要求底物与潜在的反应性载体共价连接,必须在高度稀释的情况下进行,并且必须在混合物的形式下运作。这些反应特性限制了过渡金属催化剂的应用,因为过渡金属催化剂很容易受到复杂混合物中存在的多种官能团的毒害,而且对于动力学需要高浓度反应物的反应过程也不适用。本研究将高通量纳摩尔级合成与无标记的亲和选择质谱生物分析相结合,使得每个反应在0.1摩尔浓度的条件下进行,既可能实现过渡金属催化,又使得每个反应消耗的底物不足0.05毫克。然后,使用亲和选择质谱生物分析法对反应产物与靶蛋白的亲和力进行排序,省去了耗时的反应纯化步骤。该方法使得对蛋白质抑制剂发明至关重要的初级合成和测试步骤能够快速完成,且起始材料消耗最小。纳米级合成和亲和力排序相结合的系统可以实现对给定蛋白质靶点的反应条件和生物活性进行高通量筛选,从而加速药物发现过程。