Rational design of highly selective spleen tyrosine kinase inhibitors.
Lucas, M.C., Goldstein, D.M., Hermann, J.C., Kuglstatter, A., Liu, W., Luk, K.C., Padilla, F., Slade, M., Villasenor, A.G., Wanner, J., Xie, W., Zhang, X., Liao, C.(2012) J Med Chem 55: 10414-10423
- PubMed: 23151054 
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/jm301367c
- Primary Citation of Related Structures:  
4FYN, 4FYO, 4FZ6 - PubMed Abstract: 
A novel approach to design selective spleen tyrosine kinase (Syk) inhibitors is described. Inhibition of spleen tyrosine kinase has attracted much attention as a mechanism for the treatment of autoimmune diseases such as asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, and SLE. Fostamatinib, a Syk inhibitor that successfully completed phase II clinical trials, also exhibits some undesirable side effects. More selective Syk inhibitors could offer safer, alternative treatments. Through a systematic evaluation of the kinome, we identified Pro455 and Asn457 in the Syk ATP binding site as a rare combination among sequence aligned kinases and hypothesized that optimizing the interaction between them and a Syk inhibitor molecule would impart high selectivity for Syk over other kinases. We report the structure-guided identification of three series of selective spleen tyrosine kinase inhibitors that support our hypothesis and offer useful guidance to other researchers in the field.
Organizational Affiliation: 
Small Molecule Research, Discovery Chemistry, pRED, Pharma Research and Early Development, Hoffmann-La Roche Inc., 340 Kingsland Street, Nutley, New Jersey 07110, United States. matthew.lucas@cubist.com