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Abstract

Ras proteins in association with GTP and GDP act as a biomolecular switch for signaling cell growth, cell survival and signal transduction. The presence of mutated Ras proteins is found to vary in different cancer types and the highest occurrence of about 90% is observed in pancreatic cancer. The Ras GTPase binding site is mainly involved in signal cell proliferation. Hence, this binding site has been considered as a major target. At the same time, targeting a specific protein and designing the drug molecule with respect to that is practically of no use as the target proteins are fast mutating. In this scenario, designing the template from the hot spot of proteins and fitting the template for all the target protein molecules seem to be a promising technique. The templates are initially screened on the basis of pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic requirements. Six templates are found to be satisfying conditions like IC50, lipophilic efficiency, ligand efficiency etc. and their efficiencies are compared with standard reference molecules. The computed enrichment factors support these templates to be leads for effective anti-cancer drugs subject to further in vitro and in vivo evaluation.