Computational Methods in Medicinal Chemistry : Mechanistic Investigations and Virtual Screening Development

Sammanfattning: Computational methods have become an integral part of drug development and can help bring new and better drugs to the market faster. The process of predicting the biological activity of large compound collections is known as virtual screening, and has been instrumental in the development of several drugs today in the market. Computational methods can also be used to elucidate the energies associated with chemical reactivity and predict how to improve a synthetic protocol. These two applications of computational medicinal chemistry is the focus of this thesis.In the first part of this work, quantum mechanics has been used to probe the energy surface of palladium(II)-catalyzed decarboxylative reactions in order to gain a better understating of these systems (paper I-III). These studies have mapped the reaction pathways and been able to make accurate predictions that were verified experimentally.The other focus of this work has been to develop virtual screening methodology. Our first study in the area (paper IV) investigated if the results from several virtual screening methods could be combined using data fusion techniques in order to get a more consistent result and better performance. The study showed that the results obtained from data fusion were more consistent than the results from any single method. The data fusion methods also for several target had a better performance than any of the included single methods.Next, we developed a dataset suitable for evaluating the performance of virtual screening methods when applied to large compound collection as a replacement or complement for high throughput screening (paper V). This is the first benchmark dataset of its kind.Finally, a method for using computationally derived reaction coordinates as basis for virtual screening was developed. The aim was to find inhibitors that resemble key steps in the mechanism (paper VI). This initial proof of concept study managed to locate several known and one previously not reported reaction mimetics against insulin regulated amino peptidase.