Unraveling An Off-Rate

Medicinal chemists talk a lot more about residence time and off rate than they used to. It's become clear that (at least in some cases) a key part of a drug's action is its kinetic behavior, specifically how quickly it leaves its binding site. You'd think that this would correlate well with its potency, but that's not necessarily so. Binding constants are a mix of on- and off-rates, and you can get to the same number by a variety of different means. Only if you're looking at very similar compounds with the same binding modes can you expect the correlation your intuition is telling you about, and even then you don't always get it. There's a new paper in J. Med. Chem. from a team at Boehringer Ingelheim that takes a detailed look at this effect. The authors are working out the binding to the muscarinic receptor ligand tiotropium, which has been around a long time. (Boehringer's efforts in the muscarinic field have been around a long time, too, come to think of it). Tiotropium binds to the m2 subtype with a Ki of 0.2 nM, and to the m3 subtype with a Ki of 0.1 nM. But the compound has a much slower off rate on the m3 subtype, enough to make it physiologically distinct as an m3 ligand. Tiotropium is better known by its brand name Spiriva, and if its functional selectivity at the m3 receptors in the lungs wasn't pretty tight, it wouldn't be a drug. By carefully modifying its structure and introducing mutations into the receptor, this group hoped to figure out just why it's able to...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: The Central Nervous System Source Type: blogs