1. Chemoprotective antimalarials identified through quantitative high-throughput screening of Plasmodium blood and liver stage parasites
- Author
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Paul M Will, Wenwei Huang, Stephan Meister, Dorjbal Dorjsuren, Anton Simeonov, Bryan T. Mott, Andrew T Girvin, Pranav Shah, David A. Fidock, Daniel C. Talley, Benjamin A Sigmon, Richard T. Eastman, Xin Xu, Sachel Mok, Leila S. Ross, Tomas Yeo, Daniel J. Jansen, Robert F. Campbell, Alexey V. Zakharov, Richard J. Sciotti, Carleen Klumpp-Thomas, Yevgeniya Antonova-Koch, Norman C. Waters, Juan J. Marugan, Norma Roncal, Elizabeth A. Winzeler, David J. Maloney, Kathryn J. Wicht, Ajit Jadhav, and Hongmao Sun
- Subjects
0301 basic medicine ,Parasitic infection ,Phenotypic screening ,Plasmodium berghei ,High-throughput screening ,Science ,030106 microbiology ,Plasmodium falciparum ,Drug Evaluation, Preclinical ,Pharmacology ,Protective Agents ,Plasmodium ,Article ,03 medical and health sciences ,Antimalarials ,Structure-Activity Relationship ,Parasitic Sensitivity Tests ,parasitic diseases ,Potency ,Humans ,Malaria, Falciparum ,Liver stage ,Multidisciplinary ,biology ,Chemotype ,Molecular Structure ,Thiadiazines ,Drug discovery ,Reproducibility of Results ,Hep G2 Cells ,biology.organism_classification ,High-Throughput Screening Assays ,030104 developmental biology ,Liver ,Chemoprotective ,Medicine - Abstract
The spread of Plasmodium falciparum parasites resistant to most first-line antimalarials creates an imperative to enrich the drug discovery pipeline, preferably with curative compounds that can also act prophylactically. We report a phenotypic quantitative high-throughput screen (qHTS), based on concentration–response curves, which was designed to identify compounds active against Plasmodium liver and asexual blood stage parasites. Our qHTS screened over 450,000 compounds, tested across a range of 5 to 11 concentrations, for activity against Plasmodium falciparum asexual blood stages. Active compounds were then filtered for unique structures and drug-like properties and subsequently screened in a P. berghei liver stage assay to identify novel dual-active antiplasmodial chemotypes. Hits from thiadiazine and pyrimidine azepine chemotypes were subsequently prioritized for resistance selection studies, yielding distinct mutations in P. falciparum cytochrome b, a validated antimalarial drug target. The thiadiazine chemotype was subjected to an initial medicinal chemistry campaign, yielding a metabolically stable analog with sub-micromolar potency. Our qHTS methodology and resulting dataset provides a large-scale resource to investigate Plasmodium liver and asexual blood stage parasite biology and inform further research to develop novel chemotypes as causal prophylactic antimalarials.
- Published
- 2020