作者:James J. Crawford、Wendy Lee、Ignacio Aliagas、Simon Mathieu、Klaus P. Hoeflich、Wei Zhou、Weiru Wang、Lionel Rouge、Lesley Murray、Hank La、Ning Liu、Peter W. Fan、Jonathan Cheong、Christopher E. Heise、Sreemathy Ramaswamy、Robert Mintzer、Yanzhou Liu、Qi Chao、Joachim Rudolph
DOI:10.1021/acs.jmedchem.5b00572
日期:2015.6.25
The p21-activated kinases (PAKs) play important roles in cytoskeletal organization, cellular morphogenesis, and survival and have generated significant attention as potential therapeutic targets for cancer. Following a high-throughput screen, we identified an aminopyrazole scaffold-based series that was optimized to yield group I selective PAK inhibitors. A structure-based design effort aimed at targeting the ribose pocket for both potency and selectivity led to much-improved group I vs II selectivity. Early lead compounds contained a basic primary amine, which was found to be a major metabolic soft spot with in vivo clearance proceeding predominantly via N-acetylation. We succeeded in identifying replacements with improved metabolic stability, leading to compounds with lower in vivo rodent clearance and excellent group I PAK selectivity.