Fragment-based screening for inhibitors of PDE4A using enthalpy arrays and X-ray crystallography

Abstract

Fragment-based screening has typically relied on X-ray or NMR methods to identify low affinity ligands that bind to therapeutic targets. These techniques are expensive in terms of material and time, so it useful to have a higher-throughput method to reliably pre-screen a fragment library to identify a subset of compounds for structural analysis. Calorimetry provides a label-free method to assay binding and enzymatic activity that is unaffected by the spectroscopic properties of the sample. Conventional microcalorimetry is hampered by requiring large quantities of reagents and long measurement times. Nanocalorimeters can overcome these limitations of conventional ITC. Here we have used enthalpy arrays, which are arrays of nanocalorimeters, to perform an enzyme activity based fragment screen for competitive inhibitors of phosphodiesterase 4A (PDE4A). Several inhibitors with KI<2 mM were identified and moved to X-ray crystallization trials. Although the co-crystals did not yield high-resolution data, evidence of binding was observed and the chemical structures of the hits were consistent with motifs of known PDE4 inhibitors. This study shows how array calorimetry can be used as a pre-screening method for fragment-based lead discovery with enzyme targets, and it provides a list of candidate fragments for inhibition of PDE4A.