Bridging molecular docking to molecular dynamics in exploring ligand-protein recognition process: An overview

Computational techniques have been applied in the drug discovery pipeline since the 1980s. Given the low computational resources of the time, the first molecular modeling strategies relied on a rigid view of the ligand-target binding process. During the years, the evolution of hardware technologies has gradually allowed simulating the dynamic nature of the binding event. In this work, we present an overview of the evolution of structure-based drug discovery techniques in the study of ligand-target recognition phenomenon, going from the static molecular docking toward enhanced molecular dynamics strategies

Enhanced sampling in molecular dynamics using metadynamics, replica-exchange, and temperature-acceleration

We review a selection of methods for performing enhanced sampling in molecular dynamics simulations. We consider methods based on collective variable biasing and on tempering, and offer both historical and contemporary perspectives. In collective-variable biasing, we first discuss methods stemming from thermodynamic integration that use mean force biasing, including the adaptive biasing force algorithm and temperature acceleration. We then turn to methods that use bias potentials, including umbrella sampling and metadynamics. We next consider parallel tempering and replica-exchange methods. We conclude with a brief presentation of some combination methods. \ua9 2013 by the author; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Enumeration, conformation sampling and population of libraries of peptide macrocycles for the search of chemotherapeutic cardioprotection agents

Peptides are uniquely endowed with features that allow them to perturb previously difficult to drug biomolecular targets. Peptide macrocycles in particular have seen a flurry of recent interest due to their enhanced bioavailability, tunability and specificity. Although these properties make them attractive hit-candidates in early stage drug discovery, knowing which peptides to pursue is non‐trivial due to the magnitude of the peptide sequence space. Computational screening approaches show promise in their ability to address the size of this search space but suffer from their inability to accurately interrogate the conformational landscape of peptide macrocycles. We developed an in‐silico compound enumerator that was tasked with populating a conformationally laden peptide virtual library. This library was then used in the search for cardio‐protective agents (that may be administered, reducing tissue damage during reperfusion after ischemia (heart attacks)). Our enumerator successfully generated a library of 15.2 billion compounds, requiring the use of compression algorithms, conformational sampling protocols and management of aggregated compute resources in the context of a local cluster. In the absence of experimental biophysical data, we performed biased sampling during alchemical molecular dynamics simulations in order to observe cyclophilin‐D perturbation by cyclosporine A and its mitochondrial targeted analogue. Reliable intermediate state averaging through a WHAM analysis of the biased dynamic pulling simulations confirmed that the cardio‐protective activity of cyclosporine A was due to its mitochondrial targeting. Paralleltempered solution molecular dynamics in combination with efficient clustering isolated the essential dynamics of a cyclic peptide scaffold. The rapid enumeration of skeletons from these essential dynamics gave rise to a conformation laden virtual library of all the 15.2 Billion unique cyclic peptides (given the limits on peptide sequence imposed). Analysis of this library showed the exact extent of physicochemical properties covered, relative to the bare scaffold precursor. Molecular docking of a subset of the virtual library against cyclophilin‐D showed significant improvements in affinity to the target (relative to cyclosporine A). The conformation laden virtual library, accessed by our methodology, provided derivatives that were able to make many interactions per peptide with the cyclophilin‐D target. Machine learning methods showed promise in the training of Support Vector Machines for synthetic feasibility prediction for this library. The synergy between enumeration and conformational sampling greatly improves the performance of this library during virtual screening, even when only a subset is used

Protein-Ligand Complex Generator & Drug Screening via Tiered Tensor Transform

The generation of small molecule candidate (ligand) binding poses in its target protein pocket is important for computer-aided drug discovery. Typical rigid-body docking methods ignore the pocket flexibility of protein, while the more accurate pose generation using molecular dynamics is hindered by slow protein dynamics. We develop a tiered tensor transform (3T) algorithm to rapidly generate diverse protein-ligand complex conformations for both pose and affinity estimation in drug screening, requiring neither machine learning training nor lengthy dynamics computation, while maintaining both coarse-grain-like coordinated protein dynamics and atomistic-level details of the complex pocket. The 3T conformation structures we generate achieve significantly higher accuracy in active ligand classification than traditional ensemble docking using hundreds of experimental protein conformations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that 3T can be used to explore distant protein-ligand binding poses within the protein pocket. 3T structure transformation is decoupled from the system physics, making future usage in other computational scientific domains possible

Studying protein-ligand interactions using a Monte Carlo procedure

[eng] Biomolecular simulations have been widely used in the study of protein-ligand interactions; comprehending the mechanisms involved in the prediction of binding affinities would have a significant repercussion in the pharmaceutical industry. Notwithstanding the intrinsic difficulty of sampling the phase space, hardware and methodological developments make computer simulations a promising candidate in the resolution of biophysically relevant problems. In this context, the objective of the thesis is the development of a protocol that permits studying protein-ligand interactions, in view to be applied in drug discovery pipelines. The author contributed to the rewriting PELE, our Monte Carlo sampling procedure, using good practices of software development. These involved testing, improving the readability, modularity, encapsulation, maintenance and version control, just to name a few. Importantly, the recoding resulted in a competitive cutting-edge software that is able to integrate new algorithms and platforms, such as new force fields or a graphical user interface, while being reliable and efficient. The rest of the thesis is built upon this development. At this point, we established a protocol of unbiased all-atom simulations using PELE, often combined with Markov (state) Models (MSM) to characterize the energy landscape exploration. In the thesis, we have shown that PELE is a suitable tool to map complex mechanisms in an accurate and efficient manner. For example, we successfully conducted studies of ligand migration in prolyl oligopeptidases and nuclear hormone receptors (NHRs). Using PELE, we could map the ligand migration and binding pathway in such complex systems in less than 48 hours. On the other hand, with this technique we often run batches of 100s of simulations to reduce the wall-clock time. MSM is a useful technique to join these independent simulations in a unique statistical model, as individual trajectories only need to characterize the energy landscape locally, and the global characterization can be extracted from the model. We successfully applied the combination of these two methodologies to quantify binding mechanisms and estimate the binding free energy in systems involving NHRs and tyorsinases. However, this technique represents a significant computational effort. To reduce the computational load, we developed a new methodology to overcome the sampling limitations caused by the ruggedness of the energy landscape. In particular, we used a procedure of iterative simulations with adaptive spawning points based on reinforcement learning ideas. This permits sampling binding mechanisms at a fraction of the cost, and represents a speedup of an order of magnitude in complex systems. Importantly, we show in a proof-of-concept that it can be used to estimate absolute binding free energies. Overall, we hope that the methodologies presented herein help streamline the drug design process.[spa] Las simulaciones biomoleculares se han usado ampliamente en el estudio de interacciones proteína-ligando. Comprender los mecanismos involucrados en la predicción de afinidades de unión tiene una gran repercusión en la industria farmacéutica. A pesar de las dificultades intrínsecas en el muestreo del espacio de fases, mejoras de hardware y metodológicas hacen de las simulaciones por ordenador un candidato prometedor en la resolución de problemas biofísicos con alta relevancia. En este contexto, el objetivo de la tesis es el desarrollo de un protocolo que introduce un estudio más eficiente de las interacciones proteína-ligando, con vistas a diseminar PELE, un procedimiento de muestreo de Monte Carlo, en el diseño de fármacos. Nuestro principal foco ha sido sobrepasar las limitaciones de muestreo causadas por la rugosidad del paisaje de energías, aplicando nuestro protocolo para hacer analsis detallados a nivel atomístico en receptores nucleares de hormonas, receptores acoplados a proteínas G, tirosinasas y prolil oligopeptidasas, en colaboración con una compañía farmacéutica y de varios laboratorios experimentales. Con todo ello, esperamos que las metodologías presentadas en esta tesis ayuden a mejorar el diseño de fármacos

Discovering and exploiting hidden pockets at protein interfaces

The number of three-dimensional structures of potential protein targets available in several platforms such as the Protein Data Bank is subjected to a constant increase over the last decades. This observation should be an additional motivation to use structure-based methodologies in drug discovery. In the recent years, different success stories of Structure Based Drug Design approach have been reported. However, it has also been shown that a lack of druggability is one of the major causes of failure in the development of a new compound.The concept of druggability can be used to describe proteins with the capability to bind drug-like compounds. A general consensus suggests that around 10% of the human genome codes for molecular targets that can be considered as druggable. Over the years, the protein druggability was studied with a particular interest to capture structural descriptors in order to develop computational methodologies for druggability assessment. Different computational methods have been published to detect and evaluate potential binding sites at protein surfaces. The majority of methods currently available are designed to assess druggability of a static structure. However it is well known that sometimes a few local rearrangements around the binding site can profoundly influence the affinity of a small molecule to its target. The use of techniques such as molecular dynamics (MD) or Metadynamics could be an interesting way to simulate those variations. The goal of this thesis was to design a new computational approach, called JEDI, for druggability assessment using a combination of empirical descriptors that can be collected ‘on-the-fly’ during MD simulations. JEDI is a grid-based approach able to perform the druggability assessment of a binding site in only a few seconds making it one of the fastest methodologies in the field. Agreement between computed and experimental druggability estimates is comparable to literature alternatives. In addition, the estimator is less sensitive than existing methodologies to small structural rearrangements and gives consistent druggability predictions for similar structures of the same protein. Since the JEDI function is continuous and differentiable, the druggability potential can be used as collective variable to rapidly detect cryptic druggable binding sites in proteins with a variety of MD free energy methods

Estimation of binding free energies with Monte Carlo atomistic simulations and enhanced sampling

The advances in computing power have motivated the hope that computational methods can accelerate the pace of drug discovery pipelines. For this, fast, reliable and user-friendly tools are required. One of the fields that has gotten more attentions is the prediction of binding affinities. Two main problems have been identified for such methods: insufficient sampling and inaccurate models. This thesis is focused on tackling the first problem. To this end, we present the development of efficient methods for the estimation of protein-ligand binding free energies. We have developed a protocol that combines enhanced sampling with more standard simulations methods to achieve higher efficiency. First, we run an exploratory enhanced sampling simulation, starting from the bound conformation and partially biased towards unbound poses. The we leverage the information gained from this short simulation to run, longer unbiased simulations to collect statistics. Thanks to the modularity and automation that the protocol offers we were able to test three different methods for the long simulations: PELE, molecular dynamics and AdaptivePELE. PELE and molecular dynamics showed similar results, although PELE used less computational resources. Both seemed to work well with small protein-fragment systems or proteins with not very flexible binding sites. Both failed to accurately reproduce the binding of a kinase, the Mitogen-activated protein kinase 1 (ERK2). On the other hand, AdaptivePELE did not show a great improvement over PELE, with positive results for the Urokinase-type plasminogen activator (URO) and a clear lack of sampling for the Progesterone receptor (PR). We demonstrated the importance of well-designed suite of test systems for the development of new methods. Through the use of a diverse benchmark of protein systems we have established the cases in which the protocol is expected to give accurate results, and which areas require further development. This benchmark consisted of four proteins, and over 30 ligands, much larger than the test systems typically used in the development of pathway-based free energy methods. In summary, the methodology developed in this work can contribute to the drug discovery process for a limited range of protein systems. For many other, we have observed that regular unbiased simulations are not efficient enough and more sophisticated, enhanced sampling methods are required.Els grans avenços en la capacitat de computació han motivat l'esperança que els mètodes de simulacions per ordinador puguin accelerar el ritme de descobriment de nous fàrmacs. Per a què això sigui possible, es necessiten eines ràpides, acurades i fàcils d'utilitzar. Un dels problemes que han rebut més atenció és el de la predicció d'energies lliures d'unió entre proteïna i lligand. Dos grans problemes han estat identificats per a aquests mètodes: la falta de mostreig i les aproximacions dels models. Aquesta tesi està enfocada a resoldre el primer problema. Per a això, presentem el desenvolupament de mètodes eficients per a l'estimació de d'energies lliures d'unió entre proteïna i lligand. Hem desenvolupat un protocol que combina mètodes anomenats enhanced sampling amb simulació clàssiques per a obtenir una major eficiència. Els mètodes d'enhanced sampling són una classe d'eines que apliquen algun tipus de pertorbació externa al sistema que s'està estudiant per tal d'accelerar-ne el mostreig. En el nostre protocol, primer correm una simulació exploratòria d'enhanced sampling, començant per una mostra de la unió de la proteïna i el lligand. Aquesta simulació esta parcialment esbiaixada cap a aquells estats del sistema on els dos components es troben més separats. Després utilitzem la informació obtinguda d'aquesta primera simulació més curta per a córrer una segona simulació més llarga, amb mètodes sense biaix per obtenir una estadística fidedigna del sistema. Gràcies a la modularitat i el grau d'automatització que la implementació del protocol ofereix, hem pogut provar tres mètodes diferents per les simulacions llargues: PELE, dinàmica molecular i AdaptivePELE. PELE i dinàmica molecular han mostrat resultats similars, tot i que PELE utilitza menys recursos. Els dos han mostrat bons resultats en l'estudi de sistemes de fragments o amb proteïnes amb llocs d'unió poc flexibles. Però, els dos han fallat a l'hora de reproduir els resultats experimentals per a una quinasa, la Mitogen-activated protein kinase 1 (ERK2). D'altra banda, AdaptivePELE no ha mostrat una gran millora respecte a PELE, amb resultats positius per a la proteïna Urokinase-type plasminogen activator (URO) i una clara falta de mostreig per al receptor de progesterona (PR). En aquest treball hem demostrat la importància d'establir un banc de proves equilibrat durant el desenvolupament de nous mètodes. Mitjançant l'ús d'un banc de proves divers hem pogut establir en quins casos es pot esperar que el protocol obtingui resultats acurats, i quines àrees necessiten més desenvolupament. El banc de proves ha consistit de quatre proteïnes i més de trenta lligands, molt més dels que comunament s'utilitzen en el desenvolupament de mètodes per a la predicció d'energies d'unió mitjançant mètodes basats en camins (pathway-based). En resum, la metodologia desenvolupada durant aquesta tesi pot contribuir al procés de recerca de nous fàrmacs per a certs tipus de sistemes de proteïnes. Per a la resta, hem observat que els mètodes de simulació no esbiaixats no són prou eficients i tècniques més sofisticades són necessàries.Postprint (published version

Estimation of binding free energies with Monte Carlo atomistic simulations and enhanced sampling

The advances in computing power have motivated the hope that computational methods can accelerate the pace of drug discovery pipelines. For this, fast, reliable and user-friendly tools are required. One of the fields that has gotten more attentions is the prediction of binding affinities. Two main problems have been identified for such methods: insufficient sampling and inaccurate models. This thesis is focused on tackling the first problem. To this end, we present the development of efficient methods for the estimation of protein-ligand binding free energies. We have developed a protocol that combines enhanced sampling with more standard simulations methods to achieve higher efficiency. First, we run an exploratory enhanced sampling simulation, starting from the bound conformation and partially biased towards unbound poses. The we leverage the information gained from this short simulation to run, longer unbiased simulations to collect statistics. Thanks to the modularity and automation that the protocol offers we were able to test three different methods for the long simulations: PELE, molecular dynamics and AdaptivePELE. PELE and molecular dynamics showed similar results, although PELE used less computational resources. Both seemed to work well with small protein-fragment systems or proteins with not very flexible binding sites. Both failed to accurately reproduce the binding of a kinase, the Mitogen-activated protein kinase 1 (ERK2). On the other hand, AdaptivePELE did not show a great improvement over PELE, with positive results for the Urokinase-type plasminogen activator (URO) and a clear lack of sampling for the Progesterone receptor (PR). We demonstrated the importance of well-designed suite of test systems for the development of new methods. Through the use of a diverse benchmark of protein systems we have established the cases in which the protocol is expected to give accurate results, and which areas require further development. This benchmark consisted of four proteins, and over 30 ligands, much larger than the test systems typically used in the development of pathway-based free energy methods. In summary, the methodology developed in this work can contribute to the drug discovery process for a limited range of protein systems. For many other, we have observed that regular unbiased simulations are not efficient enough and more sophisticated, enhanced sampling methods are required.Els grans avenços en la capacitat de computació han motivat l'esperança que els mètodes de simulacions per ordinador puguin accelerar el ritme de descobriment de nous fàrmacs. Per a què això sigui possible, es necessiten eines ràpides, acurades i fàcils d'utilitzar. Un dels problemes que han rebut més atenció és el de la predicció d'energies lliures d'unió entre proteïna i lligand. Dos grans problemes han estat identificats per a aquests mètodes: la falta de mostreig i les aproximacions dels models. Aquesta tesi està enfocada a resoldre el primer problema. Per a això, presentem el desenvolupament de mètodes eficients per a l'estimació de d'energies lliures d'unió entre proteïna i lligand. Hem desenvolupat un protocol que combina mètodes anomenats enhanced sampling amb simulació clàssiques per a obtenir una major eficiència. Els mètodes d'enhanced sampling són una classe d'eines que apliquen algun tipus de pertorbació externa al sistema que s'està estudiant per tal d'accelerar-ne el mostreig. En el nostre protocol, primer correm una simulació exploratòria d'enhanced sampling, començant per una mostra de la unió de la proteïna i el lligand. Aquesta simulació esta parcialment esbiaixada cap a aquells estats del sistema on els dos components es troben més separats. Després utilitzem la informació obtinguda d'aquesta primera simulació més curta per a córrer una segona simulació més llarga, amb mètodes sense biaix per obtenir una estadística fidedigna del sistema. Gràcies a la modularitat i el grau d'automatització que la implementació del protocol ofereix, hem pogut provar tres mètodes diferents per les simulacions llargues: PELE, dinàmica molecular i AdaptivePELE. PELE i dinàmica molecular han mostrat resultats similars, tot i que PELE utilitza menys recursos. Els dos han mostrat bons resultats en l'estudi de sistemes de fragments o amb proteïnes amb llocs d'unió poc flexibles. Però, els dos han fallat a l'hora de reproduir els resultats experimentals per a una quinasa, la Mitogen-activated protein kinase 1 (ERK2). D'altra banda, AdaptivePELE no ha mostrat una gran millora respecte a PELE, amb resultats positius per a la proteïna Urokinase-type plasminogen activator (URO) i una clara falta de mostreig per al receptor de progesterona (PR). En aquest treball hem demostrat la importància d'establir un banc de proves equilibrat durant el desenvolupament de nous mètodes. Mitjançant l'ús d'un banc de proves divers hem pogut establir en quins casos es pot esperar que el protocol obtingui resultats acurats, i quines àrees necessiten més desenvolupament. El banc de proves ha consistit de quatre proteïnes i més de trenta lligands, molt més dels que comunament s'utilitzen en el desenvolupament de mètodes per a la predicció d'energies d'unió mitjançant mètodes basats en camins (pathway-based). En resum, la metodologia desenvolupada durant aquesta tesi pot contribuir al procés de recerca de nous fàrmacs per a certs tipus de sistemes de proteïnes. Per a la resta, hem observat que els mètodes de simulació no esbiaixats no són prou eficients i tècniques més sofisticades són necessàries