Looking for protein stabilizing drugs with thermal shift assay

Thermal shift assay can be used for the high-throughput screening of pharmacological chaperones. These drugs are small molecules that bind a mutant protein and stabilize it. We demonstrated the robustness, reproducibility and versatility of the method using two molecules that are in clinical trial for Fabry or Pompe disease, Deoxygalactonojirimycin and N-Butyldeoxynojirimycin, and their target enzymes, lysosomal alpha-galactosidaseA and alpha-glucosidase, as test cases. We assessed the influence of solvents and of scanning rate on the measures. We showed that a value that is equivalent to the melting temperature can be obtained by the first derivatives of raw data. We discuss the advantages of the method and the precaution to be taken in running the experiments. © 2015 The Authors Drug Testing and Analysis Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.