Category Archives: Drug Delivery
A New Gradúate Student. Raúl Márquez
We’re always happy at the lab when a student defends their dissertation thesis and now it was the turn of Raúl Márquez-Avilés to do so with flying colors.
The title of his dissertation is “Molecular Dynamics Simulations of 5 potential entry inhibitors for HIV-1“. He performed 500 ns long molecular dynamics simulations of the CD4 – gp 120 proteins interacting with one or several molecules of various lead compounds with inhibitory properties. The leads were obtained previously in our group (by Durbis Castillo, now at McGill) from a massive docking library of ca. 16 million compounds, all having a central piperazine core (Fig1)
The protein gp120 is a surface glyco-protein located at the surface of the HIV virus which couples to the CD4 protein on lymphocytes-T, being this the first step in the infection process of a healthy cell; generating inhibitors of this coupling could help stop the infection from spreading systemically. Four systems were devised: (SB) The reference state for which only gp-120 and CD4 were considered, (S2) A single ligand molecule was placed in the Phe43 cavity of gp120 to assess their inhibitory capacity, (S3) the ligand was placed right outside the Phe43 cavity to assess their entry capacity, and (S4) five ligand molecules were placed outside the Phe43 cavity of gp120 to force their entry (Fig2). Their binding energies were calculated using MM-PBSA and although all five ligands show statistically similar results as inhibitors all five exhibit a stronger binding energy than the reference proving their efficacy in preventing the coupling of the virus to the healthy cell. As a bonus, his research on system S4 shed light on the existence of an allosteric site on gp120 that will warrant further research in our group.
This work is still pending publication.
Raúl Márquez has always proven to be a hard working person who is also very self-sufficient student, a very cheerful labmate, and, as I just learned yesterday, an avid chess player. I’m sure he has a bright future in whichever endeavor he chooses now. Congratulations Raúl Márquez-Avilés!
A new paper on the Weak Link Approach
Chemically actuating a molecule is a very cool thing to do and the Weak Link Approach (WLA) allows us to do precisely that through the reversible coordination of one or various organometallic centers to a longer ligand that opens or closes a macrocyclic cavity. All this leads to an allosteric effect so important in biological instances available in inorganic molecules. Once again, the Mirkin group at Nortwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has given me the opportunity to contribute with the calculations to the energetic properties of these actuators as well as their electronic properties for their use as molecular scavengers or selective capsules for various purposes such as drug delivery agents.
As in the previous WLA work (full paper), the NBODel procedure was used at the B97D/LANL2DZ level of theory, only this time the macrocycle consisted of two organometallic centers and for the first time the asymmetric opening of the cavity was achieved, as observed by NMR. With the given fragments, all possibilities shown in scheme 1 were obtained. The calculated bond energies for the Pt – S bonds are around 60 – 70 kcal/mol whereas for the Pt – Cl bonds the values are closer to 90 kcal/mol. This allows for a selective opening of the cavity which can then be closed by removing the chlorine atoms with the help of silver salts.
For the case of complex mixture 4a, 4b, and 4c, the thermochemistry calculations show they are all basically isoenergetic with differences in the thousandths of kcal/mol. The possibilities for the groups in the weakly bonded ligands are enormous; currently, there is work being done about substituting those phenyl rings for calix[4]arenes in order to have a macrucyclic capsule made by macrocylic capusules.
Thanks to Andrea D’Aquino for taking me into her project, for all the stimulating discussions and her great ideas for expanding WLA into new avenues; I’m sure she’ll succeed in surprising us with more possibilities for these allosteric macrocycles.
The full paper is published in Inorganic Chemistry from the ACS (DOI: 10.1021/acs.inorgchem.7b02745). Thanks for reading and -if you made it this far into the post- happy new year!
A New Graduate Student!
Last Friday we had a new graduate student when our very own Marco Antonio Diaz defended his BSc thesis on the in silico design of drug carriers based on calix[n]arenes. During his thesis he performed around 160 different calculations regarding the interaction energy of our host-guest inclusion complexes, both using the supramolecular method and the NBODel procedure available in NBO3.1 as provided with Gaussian 09. One of the main targets of this work was to assess both methods -with the proper BSSE corrections- in their capabilities for the calculation of interaction energies.
We found that the NBODel method consistently generates interaction energies that are similar to those of the SM method + the BSSE correction (as opposed to SM – BSSE which is the proper correction). Marco and I are still in the process of writing the article so maybe it will be published in early 2018. In this case we’re using calixarenes to deliver three drugs: warfarine, furosemide, phenylbutazone to compite with ocratoxin-A (OTA) for the binding site in Human Serum Albumin (HSA).
This project is undertaken in collaboration with my good friend Dr. Sándor Kunsági-Máté in Pécsi Tudomanyegyetem in Hungary.
Congratulations to Marco from all of us here at the lab!
A new chemist is graduated
It is with great pleasure that I announce the graduation of another member of our research group: Luis Enrique “Kike” Aguilar defended his BSc thesis yesterday and is now counting the days left for the Autumn when he’ll move to the Netherlands for a masters in computational chemistry.
Luis Enrique, Kike, calculated the interaction energies of 144 different inclusion complexes where calix and thia-calix[n]arenes were once again the chosen hosts (36 of them) and two drugs for the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), namely Sorafenib and Bosutinib, were the guests.
The publication of the corresponding article in which we once again were fortunate enough to count with the collaboration of Dr. Rodrigo Galindo from Utah University in the molecular dynamics section, is still pending but we’re confident enough that it wont take much longer until it’s out there.
Kike is a very diligent student with great learning skills, I’m sure he’ll succeed in any enterprise he sets himself off. Congratulations, Kike! Thanks for being a part of our research but more importantly for being a part of our community.
Physical Chemistry Meeting and CCIQS Symposium
Materials Research Institute at Morelia Michoacan (southern Mexico)
So many events going on and so little time to blog about.
Two weeks ago, four members of this group traveled to Morelia in southern Mexico to present their research at the XIII Mexican Physical Chemistry Meeting. The next week after that, they all brought their posters back to Toluca for the internal symposium at CCIQS, where a masters student, María Eugenia, gave a small talk about her research project concerning photosynthesis in bacteria. Below, a short description of their projects is presented in order of seniority.
María Eugenia “Maru” Sandoval
Maru is working in photosynthesis of green sulfur bacteria. Her research deals with the excited states calculations at the Time Dependent DFT level for describing the first stages of photon interaction in antennae complexes of the photosystem II, namely the Fenna-Matthews-Olsen (FMO) complex, which was selected due to its relative structural simplicity over that of more evolved organisms. Maru also gave a talk at the internal Symposium back in Toluca the very next week where she got a positive feedback which will be used in her project.
Howard Diaz
One of the many strategies out there for treatment of HIV-1 infections is to block those proteins used to anchor the virus to a healthy cell. Sort of getting the virus’ hands busy so they can’t attach to a host. 60+ new compounds derived from thiourea were screened and assessed in their interactions with protein GP120, the protein to which the attachment is made, through docking and DFT calculations. Lead compounds are reported. It must be stressed that Howard got an award at CCIQS for having one of the best posters out of 70 in the entire symposium. Kudos and thanks to you, Howard! We now have some MD simulations in order.
Howard Diaz – GP120 blockers for HIV-1
Guillermo “Memo” Caballero
His project has some nice philosophical implications if you ask me. Memo started as an experimental chemist and when he ran into a wall trying to obtain a pyridine from the non-aromatic analogue (glutarimide), he came to our group to run some calculations and find out how to force the aromatization process, or at least rationalize if it could be performed at all. Two mechanisms were proposed and now we know that even when the reaction should be quite exothermic, the reaction barriers are too high to be overcome by conventional methods. We now need to find a way to decrease those barriers (cue transition metal simulations). So in a way we are dealing here with the mechanism of a reaction that never happens (at least in an intramolecular way), leading to a reverse reductio ad absurdum reasoning – we assumed the reaction(s) did happen and we found out why is it impossible for them to happen.
No pic. available as of yet
Luis Enrique “Kike” Aguilar
Luis continues to work with calix(n)arenes, this lab’s first love, in drug delivery systems. He is working with two drugs at once: Bosutinib and Sorafenib, second generation drugs for the treatment of Chronic Myeloid Leukemia in cases were resistance to Imatinib has been developed. One of his main goals is to find a calixarene system which is able to discriminate between Bosutinib and pseudo-bosutinib, a commercial isomer which has incorrectly been available for a few years now.
!["Kike" Aguilar - Calix[n]arenes as drug carriers for Bosutinib and Sorafenib](https://joaquinbarroso.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/img_20141107_184857_856.jpg)
“Kike” Aguilar – Calix[n]arenes as drug carriers for Bosutinib and Sorafenib
The boys from the lab
reers and the advancement of our research group. Now back to work, guys!
WATOC 2014 – Virtual edition
I had a blast last week at WATOC2014 in Santiago de Chile! It was a wonderful opportunity to find old friends, meet new ones and listen to some exciting research done around the world, as well as some of the classics such as Pekka Pyykkö, who was awarded the Schrödinger medal. I decided to share my talk on SlideShare.com but also here because I found at WATOC that many many people seem to like this little space of mine! I was shocked, flattered but mostly happy to know that this little blog of mine is well regarded.
So, without further ado, here is my presentation at WATOC2014, please read the captions on each image for context. Feel free to make any comments, sharing or liking. Thanks for clicking!
Self explanatory 🙂
Administration of a drug follows one of these two extreme pharmacokinetic pathways. Either way, drugs accumulate in non-target tissues, are wasted and cause undesired secondary effects.
Ideally, a drug should arrive to the target tissue. Several polymolecular drug carriers have been developed.
In terms of monomolecular carriers, cyclodextrines have shown moderate success.
Calixarenes offer a more chemically-tunable alternative.
We decided to go with drugs for the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia
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Interaction energies were calculated with the NBODel approach, in which elements of the Fock Matrix common to two molecular fragments are deleted
This deletion yields a new Fock matrix which is re-diagonalized; the increase in energy is ascribed to the interaction between both fragments.
GTP was a small place to start (chemical space blocked due to animation lost in translation)
Interaction energies obtained
Hydrogen bonds and pi – pi interactions account for the large interaction energies
Detail of the interactions in some of the obtained geometries
MD simulations show the progress of the “release” process.
So we moved to a larger drug with more degrees of freedom (and a comercial one too)
Chemical space increased regard to the one used with GTP.
In both cases, two insertion modes were considered.
Some results…
100ns of MD show three kinds of structures (inserted, partially released and totally released)
PMF US – the profile of release tells us if the carrier is way too strong to be a carrier at all.
Where do we go from here?
Second generation CML drugs; however Bosutinib poses a funny challenge
A comercial error has released two isomers to the market, only one of them actually works. CAN WE GENERATE A RECOGNITION AGENT??
I know, some results need some attention, I know, trust me.
Also, Imatinib is cardiotoxic. We research now the competence between allegedly affected enzymes and the carriers to at least delay the toxic effect.
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Thanks to all of these wonderful guys who made all publications possible (and also those who gave the money)
(The view from my office in Toluca, Mexico) ANY QUESTIONS? Write it in the comments section!
If you made it this far, let me tell you that this is also available at Slideshare.com 🙂
Thanks for reading, commenting and sharing!
Visit to ‘Universidad de la Cañada’ in Oaxaca, Mexico
A couple of weeks ago I was invited to give a talk to a small university in southern Mexico called ‘Universidad de la Cañada‘ in the state of Oaxaca, one of the most underprivileged states in our nation. This institution is a rather small one but the work they are doing over there with as little resources as they have is truly remarkable . UNCA offers degrees in pharmacy, pharmacology, food sciences, clinical chemistry and other topics that aim to supply the needed human resources for the various industries that are settled in the region. There is a true feeling of togetherness at UNCA since they have little pieces of equipment yet they are all fully shared among researchers regardless of who received the finance to acquire them. Last year, two of their students came for a two months stay, after which, Alberto and Eduardo got their names on a publication of our research group. It was nice to see them again and even nicer to learn they are about to finish their studies and that they will come back again to our lab in late July.
Every year at UNCA there is a Pharmacology Day on which the students show the results to their research projects during a poster session and listen to lectures by guest speakers from various universities around Mexico. Most of their projects were aimed to the isolation of natural products from local resources and their usage in several kinds of consumer products. UNCA is in a very small town, village I might say, surrounded by mountains and vegetation; the view was spectacular as you may see from the pictures below. Thank you very much to my good friend Dr. Carmen Hernández-Galindo for inviting me to participate and share our work with their students, I hope we may go back again and keep a fruitful exchange between our groups.
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- UNCA
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- Me, Eduardo, Alberto
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- Some arachnids
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- Dr. Carmen Hernández and I
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- Grasshoppers. A delicacy in Oaxaca
During this talk, I took the opportunity to talk about the aforementioned paper in the context of molecular recognition and their in silico design but I think I should have talked more about the computational strategies that are most employed in the pharmaceutical industry. Never mind. I hope I get the opportunity to right this wrong. Still it was nice to give Alberto and Eduardo the opportunity to brag a little about being published authors.
Kudos to Rola Aburto, Dr. Margarita Bernabé, Dr. Rocío Rosas, and all the academic staff at UNCA for their invaluable dedication to teaching science against all odds, I can testify, through the hard work of their students, hat their effort is paying off.
New paper in Computational and Theoretical Chemistry
I always get very happy to have a new paper out there! I find it exciting but most of all liberating since it makes you feel like your work is going somewhere but most of all that it is making its way ‘out there’; there is a strong feeling of validation, I guess.
Two very different families of calix[n]arenes (Fig 1) were tested as drug carriers for a very small molecule with a huge potential as a chemotherapeutic agent against Leukemia, namely, 3-phenyl-1H-[1]benzofuro[3,2-c]pyrazole a.k.a. GTP which has proven to be an effective in vitro Tyrosine Kinase III inhibitor. Having such a low molecular weight it is expected to have a very high excretion rate therefore the use of a carrier could increase its retention time and hence its activity. This time we considered n = 4, 5, 6 and 8 for the size of the cavities and R = -SO3H and -OEt as functional groups on the upper rim as to evaluate only a polar coordinating group and a non-polar non-coordinating one since GTP offers two H-bond acceptor sites and one H-bond donor one along the π electron density that could form π – π stacking interactions between the aromatic groups on GTP and the walls of the calixarene.
Fig 1. Calixarenes under study and their complexes with GTP
Once again calculations were carried out at the B97D/6-31G(d,p) level of theory along with molecular dynamics simulations for over 100 ns of production runs. NBO Deletion interaction energies were computed in order to discern which hosts formed the most stable complexes.
NBO Del interaction energies B97D/6-31G(d,p)
You may find a link to the ScienceDirect website for downloading the paper from this link. Last, but certainly not least, I’d like to thank all coauthors for their contributions and patience in getting this study published: Dr. Rodrigo Galindo-Murillo; Alberto Olmedo-Romero; Eduardo Cruz-Flores; Dr. Petronela M. Petrar and Prof. Dr. Kunsági-Máté Sándor. Thanks a lot for everything!
Donor and acceptor H-bond sites increases the probability of keeping the drug in place for a higher retention rate
New paper in Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation
Happy new year to all my readers!
Having a new paper published is always a matter of happiness for this computational chemist but this time I’m excedingly excited about anouncing the publishing of a paper in the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, which is my highest ranked publication so far! It also establishes the consolidation of our research group at CCIQS as a solid and competitive group within the field of theoretical and computational chemistry. The title of our paper is “In Silico design of monomolecular drug carriers for the tyrosine kinase inhibitor drug Imatinib based on calix- and thiacalix[n]arene host molecules. A DFT and Molecular Dynamics study“.
In this article we aimed towards finding a suitable (thia-) calix[n]arene based drug delivery agent for the drug Imatinib (Gleevec by Novartis), which is a broadly used powerful Tyrosine Kinase III inhibitor used in the treatment of Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia and, to a lesser extent, Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumors; although Imatinib (IMB) exhibits a bioavailability close to 90% most of it is excreted, becomes bound to serum proteins or gets accumulated in other tissues such as the heart causing several undesired side effects which ultimately limit its use. By using a molecular capsule we can increase the molecular weight of the drug thus increasing its retention, and at the same time we can prevent Imatinib to bind, in its active form, to undesired proteins.
We suggested 36 different calix and thia-calix[n]arenes (CX) as possible candidates; IMB-CX complexes were manually docked and then optimized at the B97D/6-31G(d,p) level of theory; Stephan Grimme’s B97D functional was selected for its inclusion of dispersion terms, so important in describing π-π interactions. Intermolecular interaction energies were calculated under the Natural Bond Order approximation; a stable complex was needed but a too stable complex would never deliver its drug payload! This brings us to the next part of the study. A monomolecular drug delivery agent must be able to form a stable complex with the drug but it must also be able to release it. Molecular Dynamics simulations (+100 ns) and umbrella sampling methods were used to analyse the release of the drug into the aqueous media.
Optimized geometries for the 20 most stable complexes under study (B97D/6-31G*)
Potential Mean Force profiles for the four most stable complexes for position N1 and N2 from the QM simulations are shown below (Red, complexes in the N1 position, blue, N2 position). These plots, derived from the MD simulations give us an idea of the final destination of the drug respect of the calixarene carrier. In the next image, the three preferred structures (rotaxane-like; inside; released) for the final outcome of the delivery process are shown. The stability of the complexes was also assessed by calculating the values of ΔG binding through the use of the Poisson equations.
PMF for the most stable compounds
General MD simulation final structures
Thanks to my co-authors Maria Eugenia Sandoval-Salinas and Dr. Rodrigo Galindo-Murillo for their enormous contributions to this work; without their hard work and commitment to the project this paper wouldn’t have been possible.
