Identification of Allosteric Inhibitors against Active Caspase-6

Sci Rep. 2019 Apr 2;9(1):5504. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-41930-7.

Abstract

Caspase-6 is a cysteine protease that plays essential roles in programmed cell death, axonal degeneration, and development. The excess neuronal activity of Caspase-6 is associated with Alzheimer disease neuropathology and age-dependent cognitive impairment. Caspase-6 inhibition is a promising strategy to stop early stage neurodegenerative events, yet finding potent and selective Caspase-6 inhibitors has been a challenging task due to the overlapping structural and functional similarities between caspase family members. Here, we investigated how four rare non-synonymous missense single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), resulting in amino acid substitutions outside human Caspase-6 active site, affect enzyme structure and catalytic efficiency. Three investigated SNPs were found to align with a putative allosteric pocket with low sequence conservation among human caspases. Virtual screening of 57,700 compounds against the putative Caspase-6 allosteric pocket, followed by in vitro testing of the best virtual hits in recombinant human Caspase-6 activity assays identified novel allosteric Caspase-6 inhibitors with IC50 and Ki values ranging from ~2 to 13 µM. This report may pave the way towards the development and optimisation of novel small molecule allosteric Caspase-6 inhibitors and illustrates that functional characterisation of rare natural variants holds promise for the identification of allosteric sites on other therapeutic targets in drug discovery.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Allosteric Regulation / drug effects
  • Amino Acid Substitution
  • Caspase 6 / chemistry*
  • Caspase 6 / genetics
  • Caspase 6 / metabolism*
  • Caspase Inhibitors / chemistry
  • Caspase Inhibitors / pharmacology*
  • Catalytic Domain
  • Computer Simulation
  • Crystallography, X-Ray
  • Humans
  • Models, Molecular
  • Mutation, Missense*
  • Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide
  • Protein Binding
  • Protein Conformation
  • Small Molecule Libraries / chemistry
  • Small Molecule Libraries / pharmacology*
  • Structure-Activity Relationship

Substances

  • Caspase Inhibitors
  • Small Molecule Libraries
  • CASP6 protein, human
  • Caspase 6