ConspectusNew, safe and effective drugs are urgently needed to treat and
control malaria and tuberculosis, which affect millions of people
annually. However, financial return on investment in the poor settings
where these diseases are mostly prevalent is very minimal to support
market-driven drug discovery and development. Moreover, the imminent
loss of therapeutic lifespan of existing therapies due to evolution
and spread of drug resistance further compounds the urgency to identify
novel effective drugs. However, the advent of new public–private
partnerships focused on tropical diseases and the recent release of
large data sets by pharmaceutical companies on antimalarial and antituberculosis
compounds derived from phenotypic whole cell high throughput screening
have spurred renewed interest and opened new frontiers in malaria
and tuberculosis drug discovery.This Account recaps the existing
challenges facing antimalarial
and antituberculosis drug discovery, including limitations associated
with experimental animal models as well as biological complexities
intrinsic to the causative pathogens. We enlist various highlights
from a body of work within our research group aimed at identifying
and characterizing new chemical leads, and navigating these challenges
to contribute toward the global drug discovery and development pipeline
in malaria and tuberculosis. We describe a catalogue of in-house efforts
toward deriving safe and efficacious preclinical drug development
candidates via cell-based medicinal chemistry optimization of phenotypic
whole-cell medium and high throughput screening hits sourced from
various small molecule chemical libraries. We also provide an appraisal
of target-based screening, as invoked in our laboratory for mechanistic
evaluation of the hits generated, with particular focus on the enzymes
within the de novo pyrimidine biosynthetic and hemoglobin
degradation pathways, the latter constituting a heme detoxification
process and an associated cysteine protease-mediated hydrolysis of
hemoglobin. We further expound on the recombinant enzyme assays, heme
fractionation experiments, and genomic and chemoproteomic methods
that we employed to identify Plasmodium falciparum falcipain 2 (PfFP2), hemozoin formation, phosphatidylinositol
4-kinase (PfPI4K) and Mycobacterium tuberculosis cytochrome bc1 complex as the targets of the antimalarial
chalcones, pyrido[1,2-a]benzimidazoles, aminopyridines,
and antimycobacterial pyrrolo[3,4-c]pyridine-1,3(2H)-diones, respectively.In conclusion, we argue for
the expansion of chemical space through
exploitation of privileged natural product scaffolds and diversity-oriented
synthesis, as well as the broadening of druggable spaces by exploiting
available protein crystal structures, -omics data, and bioinformatics
infrastructure to explore hitherto untargeted spaces like lipid metabolism
and protein kinases in P. falciparum. Finally, we
audit the merits of both target-based and whole-cell phenotypic screening
in steering antimalarial and antituberculosis chemical matter t...