Identification of potent pyrazole based APELIN receptor (APJ) agonists
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2020-01-01
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© 2019 Elsevier Ltd The apelinergic system comprises the apelin receptor and its cognate apelin and elabela peptide ligands of various lengths. This system has become an increasingly attractive target for pulmonary and cardiometabolic diseases. Small molecule regulators of this receptor with good drug-like properties are needed. Recently, we discovered a novel pyrazole based small molecule agonist 8 of the apelin receptor (EC50 = 21.5 µM, Ki = 5.2 µM) through focused screening which was further optimized to initial lead 9 (EC50 = 0.800 µM, Ki = 1.3 µM). In our efforts to synthesize more potent agonists and to explore the structural features important for apelin receptor agonism, we carried out structural modifications at N1 of the pyrazole core as well as the amino acid side-chain of 9. Systematic modifications at these two positions provided potent small molecule agonists exhibiting EC50 values of <100 nM. Recruitment of β-arrestin as a measure of desensitization potential of select compounds was also investigated. Functional selectivity was a feature of several compounds with a bias towards calcium mobilization over β-arrestin recruitment. These compounds may be suitable as tools for in vivo studies of apelin receptor function.
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Narayanan, Sanju, Vineetha Vasukuttan, Sudarshan Rajagopal, Rangan Maitra and Scott P Runyon (2020). Identification of potent pyrazole based APELIN receptor (APJ) agonists. Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry, 28(4). pp. 115237–115237. 10.1016/j.bmc.2019.115237 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/20055.
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Sudarshan Rajagopal
I am a physician-scientist with a research focus on G protein-coupled receptor signaling in inflammation and vascular disease and a clinical focus on pulmonary vascular disease, as I serve as Co-Director of the Duke Pulmonary Vascular Disease Center. My research spans the spectrum from clinical research in pulmonary vascular disease, to translational research in cardiovascular disease, to the basic science of receptor signaling.
Our basic science resesarch focuses on understanding and untapping the signaling potential of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) to regulate inflammation in vascular disease. GPCRs are the most common transmembrane receptors in the human genome (over 800 members) and are some of the most successful targets for drug therapies. While it has been known for some time that these receptors signal through multiple downstream effectors (such as heterotrimeric G proteins and multifunctional beta arrestin adapter proteins), over the past decade it has been better appreciated that these receptors are capable of signaling with different efficacies to these effectors, a phenomenon referred to as “biased agonism”. Ligands can be biased, by activating different pathways from one another, and receptors can be biased, by signaling to a limited number of pathways that are normally available to them. Moreover, this phenomenon also appears to be common to other transmembrane and nuclear receptors. While a growing number of biased agonists acting at multiple receptors have been identified, there is still little known regarding the mechanisms underlying biased signaling and its physiologic impact.
Much of our research focuses on the chemokine system, which consists of approximately twenty receptors and fifty ligands that display considerable promiscuity with each other in the regulation of immune cell function in inflammatory diseases. Research from our group and others have shown that many of these ligands act as biased agonists when signaling through the same receptor. We use models of inflammation such as contact hypersensitivity and pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). PAH is a disease of the pulmonary arterioles that results in right heart failure and most of its treatments target signaling by GPCRs. We use multiple approaches to probe these signaling mechanisms, including in-house pharmacological assays, advanced phosphoproteomics and single cell RNA sequencing.
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