A fragment-based lead discovery approach was used to discover novel ERK2 inhibitors. The crystal structure of N-benzyl-9H-purin-6-amine 1 in complex with ERK2 elucidated its hinge-binding mode. In addition, the simultaneous binding of an imidazole molecule adjacent to 1 suggested a direction for fragment expansion ...
A fragment-based lead discovery approach was used to discover novel ERK2 inhibitors. The crystal structure of N-benzyl-9H-purin-6-amine 1 in complex with ERK2 elucidated its hinge-binding mode. In addition, the simultaneous binding of an imidazole molecule adjacent to 1 suggested a direction for fragment expansion. Structure-based core hopping applied to 1 led to 5H-pyrrolo[3,2-b]pyrazine (3) that afforded direct vectors to probe the pockets of interest while retaining the essential hinge binding elements. Utilizing the new vectors for SAR exploration, the new core 3 was quickly optimized to compound 39 resulting in a greater than 6600-fold improvement in potency.
Organizational Affiliation:
Department of Computational Chemistry, Genentech, Inc., South San Francisco, CA 94080, United States. Electronic address: chen.huifen@gene.com.
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