Pharmacophore modeling, molecular docking, and molecular dynamics simulation approaches for identifying new lead compounds for inhibiting aldose reductase 2

Aldose reductase 2 (ALR2), which catalyzes the reduction of glucose to sorbitol using NADP as a cofactor, has been implicated in the etiology of secondary complications of diabetes. A pharmacophore model, Hypo1, was built based on 26 compounds with known ALR2-inhibiting activity values. Hypo1 contains important chemical features required for an ALR2 inhibitor, and demonstrates good predictive ability by having a high correlation coefficient (0.95) as well as the highest cost difference (128.44) and the lowest RMS deviation (1.02) among the ten pharmacophore models examined. Hypo1 was further validated by Fisher's randomization method (95%), test set (r = 0.91), and the decoy set shows the goodness of fit (0.70). Furthermore, during virtual screening, Hypo1 was used as a 3D query to screen the NCI database, and the hit leads were sorted by applying Lipinski's rule of five and ADME properties. The best-fitting leads were subjected to docking to identify a suitable orientation at the ALR2 active site. The molecule that showed the strongest interactions with the critical amino acids was used in molecular dynamics simulations to calculate its binding affinity to the candidate molecules. Thus, Hypo1 describes the key structure-activity relationship along with the estimated activities of ALR2 inhibitors. The hit molecules were searched against PubChem to find similar molecules with new scaffolds. Finally, four molecules were found to satisfy all of the chemical features and the geometric constraints of Hypo1, as well as to show good dock scores, PLPs and PMFs. Thus, we believe that Hypo1 facilitates the selection of novel scaffolds for ALR2, allowing new classes of ALR2 inhibitors to be designed.