Evidence Hub

Identification of a nanomolar affinity α-synuclein fibril imaging probe by ultra-high throughput in silico screening

John Joseph Ferrie, Zsofia Lengyel‐Zhand, Bieneke Janssen, Marshall G. Lougee, Sam G. Giannakoulias, Chia‐Ju Hsieh, Vinayak Vishnu Pagar, Chi-Chang Weng et al.

Chemical Science, 2020

58 citations

Abstract

screening strategy using idealized pseudo-ligands termed exemplars to identify compounds for experimental binding studies. For the top hit from this screen, we used photo-crosslinking to confirm its binding site and studied the structure-activity relationship of its analogs to develop multiple molecules with nanomolar affinity for αS fibrils and moderate specificity for αS over Aβ fibrils. Lastly, we demonstrated the potential of the lead analog as an imaging probe by measuring binding to αS-enriched homogenates from mouse brain tissue using a radiolabeled analog of the identified molecule. This study demonstrates the validity of our powerful new approach to the discovery of PET probes for challenging molecular targets.

Read the paper

Related studies

Go deeper in Evidence Hub

Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.

Open this study Sign up free