Interaction of the urokinase receptor (uPAR) with its binding partners including the urokinase-type plasminogen activator (uPA) at the cell surface triggers a series of proteolytic and signaling events that promote invasion and metastasis. Here, we report the discovery of a small molecule (IPR-456) and its derivatives that inhibit the tight uPAR·uPA protein-protein interaction. IPR-456 was discovered by virtual screening against multiple conformations of uPAR sampled from explicit-solvent molecular dynamics simulations. Biochemical characterization reveal that the compound binds to uPAR with sub-micromolar affinity (Kd = 310 nM) and inhibits the tight protein-protein interaction with an IC50 of 10 μM. Free energy calculations based on explicit-solvent molecular dynamics simulations suggested the importance of a carboxylate moiety on IPR-456, which was confirmed by the activity of several derivatives including IPR-803. Immunofluorescence imaging showed that IPR-456 inhibited uPA binding to uPAR of breast MDA-MB-231 tumor cells with an IC50 of 8 μM. The compounds blocked MDA-MB-231 cell invasion, but IPR-456 showed little effect on MDA-MB-231 migration, and no effect on adhesion, suggesting that uPAR mediates these processes through its other binding partners.

We assess the performance of our previously reported structure-based support vector machine target-specific scoring function across 41 targets, 40 among them from the Directory of Useful Decoys (DUD). The area under the curve of receiver characteristic plots (ROC-AUC) revealed that scoring with SVMSP resulted in consistently better enrichment over all targets families and outperforming Glide and other scoring functions, most notably among kinases. In addition, SVM-SP performance showed little variation among protein classes, exhibited excellent performance in a test case using a homology model, and in some cases showed high enrichment even with few structures used to train a model. We put SVM-SP to the test by virtual screening 1,125 compounds against two kinases, EGFR and CaMKII. Among the top 25 EGFR compounds, three compounds (1–3) inhibited kinase activity in vitro with IC50 of 58, 2, and 10 μM. In cell culture, compounds 1–3 inhibited non-small cell lung carcinoma (H1299) cancer cell proliferation with similar IC50 values for compound 3. For CaMKII, one compound inhibited kinase activity in a dose-dependent manner among 20 tested with an IC50 of 48 μM. These results are encouraging given that our in-house library consists of compounds that emerged from virtual screening of other targets with pockets that are different from typical ATP binding sites found in kinases. In light of the importance of kinases in chemical biology, these findings could have implications in future efforts to identify chemical probes of kinases within the human kinome.

Virtual screening targeting the urokinase receptor (uPAR) led to (3R)-4-cyclohexyl-3-(hexahydrobenzo[d][1,3]dioxol-5-yl)-N-((hexahydrobenzo[d][1,3]dioxol-5-yl)methyl)butan-1-aminium 1 (IPR-1) and 4-(4-((3,5-dimethylcyclohexyl)carbamoyl)-2-(4-isopropylcyclohexyl)pyrazolidin-3-yl)piperidin-1-ium 3 (IPR-69). Synthesis of an analog of 1, namely 2 (IPR-9), and 3 led to breast MDA-MB-231 invasion, migration and adhesion assays with IC50 near 30 μM. Both compounds blocked angiogenesis with IC50 of 3 μM. Compounds 2 and 3 inhibited cell growth with IC50 of 6 and 18 μM and induced apoptosis. Biochemical assays revealed lead-like properties for 3, but not 2. Compound 3 administered orally reached peak concentration of nearly 40 μM with a half-life of about 2 hours. In NOD-SCID mice inoculated with breast TMD-231 cells in their mammary fat pads, compound 3 showed a 20% reduction in tumor volumes and less extensive metastasis was observed for the treated mice. The suitable pharmacokinetic properties of 3 and the encouraging preliminary results in metastasis make it an ideal starting point for next generation compounds.

The urokinase receptor (uPAR) serves as a docking site to the serine protease urokinase-type plasminogen activator (uPA) to promote extracellular matrix (ECM) degradation and tumor invasion and metastasis. Previously, we had reported a small molecule inhibitor of the uPAR•uPA interaction that emerged from structure-based virtual screening. Here, we measure the affinity of a large number of derivatives from commercial sources. Synthesis of additional compounds was carried out to probe the role of various groups on the parent compound. Extensive structure-based computational studies suggested a binding mode for these compounds that led to a structure-activity relationship study. Cellular studies in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) cell lines that include A549, H460 and H1299 showed that compounds blocked invasion, migration and adhesion. The effects on invasion of active compounds were consistent with their inhibition of uPA and MMP proteolytic activity. These compounds showed weak cytotoxicity consistent with the confined role of uPAR to metastasis.