Comparative reactivity analysis of small-molecule thiol surrogates

Targeted covalent inhibitors represent an increasingly popular approach to modulate challenging drug targets. Since covalent and non-covalent interactions are both contributing to the affinity of these compounds, evaluation of their reactivity is a key-step to find feasible warheads. There are well-established HPLC- and NMR-based kinetic assays to tackle this task, however, they use a variety of cysteine-surrogates including cysteamine, cysteine or acetyl-cysteine and GSH. The diverse nature of the thiol sources often makes the results incomparable that prevents compiling a comprehensive knowledge base for the design of covalent inhibitors. To evaluate kinetic measurements from different sources we performed a comparative analysis of the different thiol surrogates against a designed set of electrophilic fragments equipped with a range of warheads. Our study included seven different thiol models and 13 warheads resulting in a reactivity matrix analysed thoroughly. We found that the reactivity profile might be significantly different for various thiol models. Comparing the different warheads, we concluded that – in addition to its human relevance - glutathione (GSH) provided the best estimate of reactivity with highest number of true positives identified.