IDENTIFICATION OF NEW CYCLOOXYGENASE-2 SELECTIVE INHIBITORS VIA VIRTUAL SCREENING AND COMPLEX-BASED PHARMACOPHORE MAPPING
Authors: Lubna Shah  , Mehreen Ghufran  , Haider Ali Khan  , Mohtasim Billah  , Nasir Ahmed  , Muhammad Riaz  , Muhammad Siddiq  
Published: June 2024

Background: New and effective COX-2-targeted medications may cure cancer, inflammation, and other disorders.It’s difficult to produce druggable site inhibitors for target protein inhibition that are strong and selective. Such medications need a more informed structure-based or ligand-based drug discovery technique. MOE was used to create asix-point COX-2 selective inhibitor pharmacophore from 43 compounds. The structure includes three aromatic rings,one hydrophobic group (Hyd), one donor (Don), and three H-bond acceptors. A pharmacophore was used to digitallyfilter the Chembridge database to locate additional structural poses that fulfilled the model’s requirements. We found2090 structurally diverse hits after filtering. Molecular docking was performed on 767 hits after Lipinski’s rule of fivedetermined druggability. Twenty compounds with high active site amino acid residue interactions and diverse scaffoldswere chosen. The first COX-2 isoform-inhibiting medicines were discovered using structure-based pharmacophores.Objectives Using complex-based pharmacophore mapping and virtual screening, this research seeks novel selectiveCOX-2 inhibitors. This involves filtering through a chemical database, defining critical interactions, maximizing hits,and extending drug development for safer and more effective inflammation and pain managemStudy design : Employing Advanced Computational And Pharmacological Approaches StudyDuration and place of study :The study was conducted at Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan from jan2017 to jan 2018Methods: The investigation used a structure-based drug discovery methodology to find novel cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2)selective inhibitors. The COX-2 crystal structure was used to create a pharmacophore model, which was then used tovirtually search a chemical database. In order to identify potential lead compounds based on interactions with importantCOX-2 residues, binding energies were computed, and molecular docking was used to refine hits.Results: The goal of the project was to use virtual screening and complex-based pharmacophore mapping to findnovel selective COX-2 inhibitors. After the COX-2 crystal structure was used to create a pharmacophore model,2090 hits were discovered in a database. Following the druggability assessment, 767 hits were chosen for moleculardocking. Ultimately, twenty compounds were found to be promising COX-2 inhibitors due to their strong interactionswith COX-2 and variety of scaffolds.Conclusion: This study found 20 possible lead drugs that selectively block cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) using complex-based pharmacophore mapping and virtual screening. These substances show a variety of scaffolds and robustinteractions with COX-2, making them attractive candidates for further research and development as anti-inflammatoryand anti-cancer medications with maybe fewer adverse effects.Keywords: Cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2),Pharmacophore mapping,Virtual screening,Drug discovery