Publications by authors named "Duc-Duy Vo"

Article Synopsis
  • Macrocycles, derived from natural products, are important in fighting infectious diseases, particularly malaria and certain tropical parasites.
  • Researchers discovered new macrocycles related to hymenocardine that effectively inhibit the growth of these parasites, some being more potent than the existing oral drug miltefosine for visceral leishmaniasis.
  • While these new compounds show good cell permeability and potential for oral use, challenges remain regarding their low solubility and metabolic stability, suggesting further optimization is needed to enhance their effectiveness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The SARS-CoV-2 main protease, a vital enzyme for virus replication, is a potential target for developing drugs in COVID-19 treatment. Until now, three SARS-CoV-2 main protease inhibitors have been approved for COVID-19 treatment. This study explored the inhibitory potency of asymmetric imidazole-4,5-dicarboxamide derivatives against the SARS-CoV-2 main protease.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing protein structure prediction, providing unprecedented opportunities for drug design. To assess the potential impact on ligand discovery, we compared virtual screens using protein structures generated by the AlphaFold machine learning method and traditional homology modeling. More than 16 million compounds were docked to models of the trace amine-associated receptor 1 (TAAR1), a G protein-coupled receptor of unknown structure and target for treating neuropsychiatric disorders.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Two series of N-(heteroaryl)thiophene sulfonamides, encompassing either a methylene imidazole group or a tert-butylimidazolylacetyl group in the meta position of the benzene ring, have been synthesized. An ATR selective ligand with a K of 42 nM was identified in the first series and in the second series, six ATR selective ligands with significantly improved binding affinities and K values of <5 nM were discovered. The binding modes to ATR were explored by docking calculations combined with molecular dynamics simulations.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Development of subtype-selective leads is essential in drug discovery campaigns targeting G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). Herein, a structure-based virtual screening approach to rationally design subtype-selective ligands was applied to the A and A adenosine receptors (AR and AR). Crystal structures of these closely related subtypes revealed a non-conserved subpocket in the binding sites that could be exploited to identify AR selective ligands.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) play important roles in physiological processes and are modulated by drugs that either activate or block signaling. Rational design of the pharmacological efficacy profiles of GPCR ligands could enable the development of more efficient drugs, but is challenging even if high-resolution receptor structures are available. We performed molecular dynamics simulations of the β adrenergic receptor in active and inactive conformations to assess if binding free energy calculations can predict differences in ligand efficacy for closely related compounds.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Conformational analysis is central to the design of bioactive molecules. It is particularly challenging for macrocycles due to noncovalent transannular interactions, steric interactions, and ring strain that are often coupled. Herein, we simulated the conformations of five macrocycles designed to express a progression of increasing complexity in environment-dependent intramolecular interactions and verified the results against NMR measurements in chloroform and dimethyl sulfoxide.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Grammicin (Gra) is derived from the endophytic fungus Xylaria grammica EL000614 and shows nematicidal activity against the devastating root-knot nematode Meloidogyne incognita in-vitro, in planta, and in-field experiments. However, the mechanism of the nematicidal action of Gra remains unclear. In this study, Gra exposure to the model genetic organism Caenorhabditis elegans affected its L1, L2/3, L4, and young adult stages.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Fragment-based drug discovery relies on successful optimization of weakly binding ligands for affinity and selectivity. Herein, we explored strategies for structure-based evolution of fragments binding to a G protein-coupled receptor. Molecular dynamics simulations combined with rigorous free energy calculations guided synthesis of nanomolar ligands with up to >1000-fold improvements of binding affinity and close to 40-fold subtype selectivity.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Targeting RNAs using small molecules is an emerging field of medicinal chemistry and holds promise for the discovery of efficient tools for chemical biology. MicroRNAs are particularly interesting targets since they are involved in a number of pathologies such as cancers. Indeed, overexpressed microRNAs in cancer are oncogenic and various series of inhibitors of microRNAs biogenesis have been developed in recent years.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Many diseases are polygenic and can only be treated efficiently with drugs that modulate multiple targets. However, rational design of compounds with multi-target profiles is rarely pursued because it is considered too difficult, in particular if the drug must enter the central nervous system. Here, a structure-based strategy to identify dual-target ligands of G-protein-coupled receptors is presented.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Bacterial infections continue to threaten humankind and the rapid spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria is alarming. Current antibiotics target essential bacterial processes and thereby apply a strong selective pressure on pathogenic and non-pathogenic bacteria alike. One alternative strategy is to block bacterial virulence systems that are essential for the ability to cause disease but not for general bacterial viability.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Besides physical consequences, obesity has negative psychological effects, thereby lowering human life quality. Major psychological consequences of this disorder includes depression, impaired body image, low self-esteem, eating disorders, stress and poor quality of life, which are correlated with age and gender. Physical interventions, mainly diet control and energy balance, have been widely applied to treat obesity; and some psychological interventions including behavioral therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy and hypnotherapy have showed some effects on obesity treatment.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a recently discovered category of small RNA molecules that regulate gene expression at the post-transcriptional level. Accumulating evidence indicates that miRNAs are aberrantly expressed in a variety of human cancers, thus being oncogenic. The inhibition of oncogenic miRNAs (defined as the blocking of miRNAs' production or function) would find application in the therapy of different types of cancer in which these miRNAs are implicated.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Resveratrol-based natural products constitute a valuable source of unique compounds with diverse biological activities. In this report we investigate demethylation strategies to minimize formation of cyclized and dimerized products during the synthesis of viniferifuran and analogues. We found that boron trichloride/tetra-butylammonium iodide (BCl/TBAI) is typically more effective than boron tribromide (BBr).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Benzofuran and 2,3-dihydrobenzofuran scaffolds are core components in a large number of biologically active natural and synthetic compounds including approved drugs. Herein, we report efficient synthetic protocols for preparation of libraries based on 3-carboxy 2-aryl benzofuran and 3-carboxy 2-aryl trans-2,3-dihydrobenzofuran scaffolds using commercially available salicylaldehydes, aryl boronic acids or halides and primary or secondary amines. The building blocks were selected to achieve variation in physicochemical properties and statistical molecular design and subsequent synthesis resulted in 54 lead-like compounds with molecular weights of 299-421 and calculated octanol/water partition coefficients of 1.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a recently discovered category of small RNA molecules that regulate gene expression at the post-transcriptional level. Accumulating evidence indicates that miRNAs are aberrantly expressed in a variety of human cancers and that the inhibition of these oncogenic miRNAs could find application in the therapy of different types of cancer. Herein, we describe the synthesis and biological evaluation of new small-molecule drugs that target oncogenic miRNAs production.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The Bcl-2 family includes 26 proteins involved in apoptosis. Cancer cells can develop the ability to avoid apoptosis through the upregulation and/or down regulation of such proteins Bax, Bcl-xL or Mcl-1, especially during chemoresistance progress. These proteins engaged in a network of dynamic interactions that control apoptosis triggering have become attractive therapeutic targets in cancers including melanoma.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are non-coding RNAs that regulate gene expression at the post-transcriptional level. It is now well established that the overexpression of some miRNAs (oncogenic miRNAs) is responsible for initiation and progression of human cancers and the discovery of new molecules able to interfere with their production and/or function represents one of the most important challenges of current medicinal chemistry of RNA ligands. In this work, we studied the ability of 18 different antibiotics, known as prokaryotic ribosomal RNA, to bind to oncogenic miRNA precursors (stem-loop structured pre-miRNAs) in order to inhibit miRNAs production.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Inhibition of Bcl-2 family protein-protein interactions (PPI) is a very promising direction in cancer chemotherapy. Hence over the last decade, many medicinal chemistry studies endeavoured to discover drug candidates, and a wealth of chemical scaffolds with striking chemical diversity was reported as Bcl-xL inhibitors. This raises the question of whether all these molecules could occupy a unique binding site, or rather discrete pockets of the protein surface.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We describe the synthesis of a series of new molecules containing phenol and triazoles moieties, compounds which have been evaluated for their ability to inhibit Bax/Bcl-xL interactions in cancer cells, by using BRET assays, and to induce cell death. Several derivatives exhibit a very promising activity, being more potent than the reference compounds acylpyrogallol A and ABT-737. These preliminary results demonstrate that derivatives of this family can be attractive to develop new molecules with potent anticancer activity.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a recently discovered category of small RNA molecules that regulate gene expression at the post-transcriptional level. Accumulating evidence indicates that miRNAs are aberrantly expressed in a variety of human cancers and revealed to be oncogenic and to play a pivotal role in initiation and progression of these pathologies. It is now clear that the inhibition of oncogenic miRNAs, defined as blocking their biosynthesis or their function, could find an application in the therapy of different types of cancer in which these miRNAs are implicated.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This paper describes the synthesis of nine selected diaryl/heteroaryl-containing phenol and polyphenol derivatives which have been evaluated against Bax/Bcl-xL interaction in comparison with ABT-737. Using a BRET assay, six of these derivatives exhibit activity comparable to ABT-737 to disrupt Bax/Bcl-xL interaction. These preliminary results demonstrate that such polyphenol-derived molecules are attractive compounds regarding anticancer activity and that the phenol at position 3 is important regarding disruption of Bax/Bcl-xL interaction.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A versatile synthetic route is reported towards the preparation of new analogues for potent neurotrophic agent biaryl-type lignan honokiol. A focused 24-membered library of derivatives containing five different groups at 5'-position of honokiol has been prepared in fair to good overall yields. Compared to the natural product, or to analogues with a short alkyl chain in this position, these new derivatives have lost most of the neurotrophic activity.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF