Design,synthesis,and biological evaluation of multiple targeting antimalarials

摘要

Malaria still threatens global health seriously today.While the current discoveries of antimalarials are almost totally focused on single mode-of-action inhibitors,multi-targeting inhibitors are highly desired to overcome the increasingly serious drug resistance.Here,we performed a structure-based drug design on mitochondrial respiratory chain of Plasmodium falciparum and identified an extremely potent molecule,RYL-581,which binds to multiple protein binding sites of P.falciparum simultaneously(allosteric site of type Ⅱ NADH dehydrogenase,Q_(o) and Q_(i) sites of cytochrome bc_(1)).Antimalarials with such multiple targeting mechanism of action have never been reported before.RYL-581 kills various drug-resistant strains in vitro and shows good solubility as well as in vivo activity.This structurebased strategy for designing RYL-581 from starting compound may be helpful for other medicinal chemistry projects in the future,especially for drug discovery on membrane-associated targets.