Dingyu Hu

Design, synthesis and biological evaluation of novel dual inhibitors of acetylcholinesterase and beta-secretase

To explore novel effective drugs for the treatment of Alzheimers disease (AD), a series of dual inhibitors of acetylcholineterase (AChE) and beta-secretase (BACE-1) were designed based on the multi-target-directed ligands strategy. Among them, inhibitor 28 exhibited good dual potency in enzyme inhibitory potency assay (BACE-1: IC(50)=0.567 microM; AChE: IC(50)=1.83 microM), and also showed excellent inhibitory effects on Abeta production of APP transfected HEK293 cells (IC(50)=98.7 nM) and mild protective effect against hydrogen peroxide (H(2)O(2))-induced PC12 cell injury. Encouragingly, intracerebroventricular injection of 28 into amyloid precursor protein (APP) transgenic mice caused a 29% reduction of Abeta(1-40) production. Therefore, 28 was demonstrated as a good lead compound for the further study and more importantly, the strategy of AChE and BACE-1 dual inhibitors might be a promising direction for developing novel drugs for AD patients.

ScafBank: a public comprehensive Scaffold database to support molecular hopping

AbstractAim:The search for molecules whose bioactivities are similar to those of given compounds or to optimize the initial lead compounds from high throughput screening has attracted increasing interest in recent years. Our goal is to provide a publically searchable database of scaffolds out from a large collection of existing chemical molecules.Results:Although a number of in silico methods have emerged to facilitate this process, which has become known as ”scaffold hopping” or “molecular hopping”, there is an urgent need for a database system to provide such valuable data in the drug design field. Here we have systematically analyzed a collection of commercially available small molecule databases and a bioactive compound database to identify unique scaffolds and we have built apublically searchable database. The analysis of approximately 4 800 000 of these compounds identified 241 824 unique scaffolds, which are stored in a relational database (http://202.127.30.184:8080/db.html). Each entry in the database is associated with a molecular occurrence and includes its distribution of molecular properties, such as molecular weight, logP, hydrogen bond acceptor number, hydrogen bond donor number, rotatable bond number and ring number. More importantly, for scaffolds derived from the bioactive compounds database, it also contains the original compounds and their target information.Conclusion:This Web-based database system could help researchers in the fields of medicinal and organic chemistry to design novel molecules with properties similar to the original compounds, but built on novel scaffolds.

CCLab--a multi-objective genetic algorithm based combinatorial library design software and an application for histone deacetylase inhibitor design.

The introduction of the multi-objective optimization has dramatically changed the virtual combinatorial library design, which can consider many objectives simultaneously, such as synthesis cost and drug-likeness, thus may increase positive rates of biological active compounds. Here we described a software called CCLab (Combinatorial Chemistry Laboratory) for combinatorial library design based on the multi-objective genetic algorithm. Tests of the convergence ability and the ratio to re-take the building blocks in the reference library were conducted to assess the software in silico, and then it was applied to a real case of designing a 5×6 HDAC inhibitor library. Sixteen compounds in the resulted library were synthesized, and the histone deactetylase (HDAC) enzymatic assays proved that 14 compounds showed inhibitory ratios more than 50% against tested 3 HDAC enzymes at concentration of 20 μg/mL, with IC(50) values of 3 compounds comparable to SAHA. These results demonstrated that the CCLab software could enhance the hit rates of the designed library and would be beneficial for medicinal chemists to design focused library in drug development (the software can be downloaded at: http://202.127.30.184:8080/drugdesign.html).

Synthesis and bioassay of β-(1,4)-D-mannans as potential agents against Alzheimer's disease

Aim:Oligomannurarate 971 derived from a marine plant has shown neuroprotective effects. In this study we synthesized a series of truncated derivatives of the oligosaccharide, and investigated the effect of these derivatives against Aβ peptide toxicity in vitro.Methods:The sulfoxide method was applied to synthesize the derivatives. SH-SY5Y human neuroblastoma cells were treated with Aβ1-40 (2 μmol/L), and the cell viability was detected using a CCK8 assay.Results:A series of β-(1,4)-D-mannosyl oligosaccharide, ranging from the disaccharide to the hexasaccharide, were synthesized. Addition of 10 μmol/L β-(1,4)-D-mannobiose 6, β-(1,4)-D-mannotriose 9 or β-(1,4)-D-mannotetraose 12 in SH-SY5Y cells significantly attenuated Aβ1-40-induced toxicity. The efficacies were similar to those caused by 10 μmol/L oligomannurarate 971 or alzhemed. Other oligosaccharides including oligomaltoses and oligocelluloses were less active.Conclusion:Synthetic homogeneous short chain β-(1,4)-D-mannans shows neuroprotective effect against Aβ peptide toxicity similar to that of heterogeneous oligomannurarate 971 and alzhemed.

Aromatic β-amino-ketone derivatives as novel selective non-steroidal progesterone receptor antagonists

A novel class of non-steroidal progesterone receptor antagonists with aromatic beta-amino-ketone scaffold have been synthesized and characterized with high binding affinity and great selectivity for the cognate receptors. Among them, compound 22 was shown to be the most potent progesterone receptor antagonist in cotransfection assay and a murine model of ligand-induced decidualization.