Full text
| |
| Author(s): |
Renato Ferreira de Freitas
Total Authors: 1
|
| Document type: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Press: | São Carlos. |
| Institution: | Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Instituto de Química de São Carlos (IQSC/BT) |
| Defense date: | 2009-12-04 |
| Examining board members: |
Carlos Alberto Montanari;
Júlio César Borges
|
| Advisor: | Carlos Alberto Montanari |
| Abstract | |
Chagas disease, caused by Trypanosoma cruzi, is a tropical disease, which afflicts millions of people, thus generating devastating socio-economic consequences. It has been pointed out that it is a super-neglected tropical disease, based on available drugs with low efficacy and that give rise to many side effects. In addition, these drugs were introduced three decades ago. With this scenario, it is clear the necessity of the discovery, development and introduction of new efficient drugs to treat Chagas disease. The enzyme glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase is a promising target for the development of new drugs against trypanosomatides, since the enzymes of the glycolytic pathway display a fundamental role in the energy supply to parasite survival. In this thesis, this enzyme was selected for medicinal chemistry within the cheminformatics framework aiming at the identification of potential enzymatic and parasite inhibitors. In the first part, structure-based virtual screening (SBVS) methods were employed in the selection and identification of compounds. Based on the in silico design, twenty compounds were selected and experimentally evaluated in the second part using the isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC) technique. Out of these, eleven compounds inhibited the T. cruzi GAPDH, resulting in high hit rates (>= 20 %). The new selected inhibitors display excellent ligand efficiency (LE), as well as some selectivity for the parasite enzyme. The inhibitors assay against the trypomastigote form of T. cruzi was used to identify two compounds able to inhibit this infective form, and one showed to be a strong amastigote parasite inhibitor, also disclosing low cytotoxicity profile. The best two classes of GAPDH and parasite inhibitors were selected for the establishment of a quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR). 2D QSAR (HQSAR) studies resulted in linear models with high predictive power, amenable for the identification of important structural features in the process of hit-to-lead optimization. (AU) | |