Tuesday, September 17, 2019

SuFEx-enabled, agnostic discovery of covalent inhibitors of human neutrophil elastase

Qinheng Zheng, Jordan L. Woehl, Seiya Kitamura, Diogo Santos-Martins, Christopher J. Smedley, Gencheng Li, Stefano Forli, John E. Moses, Dennis W. Wolan, and K. Barry Sharpless

PNAS2019 116 (38) 18808-18814
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1909972116

Sulfur fluoride exchange (SuFEx) has emerged as the new generation of click chemistry. We report here a SuFEx-enabled, agnostic approach for the discovery and optimization of covalent inhibitors of human neutrophil elastase (hNE). Evaluation of our ever-growing collection of SuFExable compounds toward various biological assays unexpectedly revealed a selective and covalent hNE inhibitor: benzene-1,2-disulfonyl fluoride. Synthetic derivatization of the initial hit led to a more potent agent, 2-(fluorosulfonyl)phenyl fluorosulfate with IC50 0.24 μM and greater than 833-fold selectivity over the homologous neutrophil serine protease, cathepsin G. The optimized, yet simple benzenoid probe only modified active hNE and not its denatured form.

Covalent Probes Reveal Small-Molecule Binding Pockets in Structured RNA and Enable Bioactive Compound Design

Sandra Kovachka, Jielei Wang, Amirhossein Taghavi, Yilin Jia, Taro Asaba, Karen C. Wolff, Mason Martin, Xueyi Yang, Samantha M. Meyer, Sabin...