Over
the past decade, two independent technologies have emerged
and been widely adopted by the neuroscience community for remotely
controlling neuronal activity: optogenetics which utilize engineered
channelrhodopsin and other opsins, and chemogenetics which utilize
engineered G protein-coupled receptors (Designer Receptors Exclusively
Activated by Designer Drugs (DREADDs)) and other orthologous ligand–receptor
pairs. Using directed molecular evolution, two types of DREADDs derived
from human muscarinic acetylcholine receptors have been developed:
hM3Dq which activates neuronal firing, and hM4Di which inhibits neuronal
firing. Importantly, these DREADDs were not activated by the native
ligand acetylcholine (ACh), but selectively activated by clozapine N-oxide (CNO), a pharmacologically inert ligand. CNO has
been used extensively in rodent models to activate DREADDs, and although
CNO is not subject to significant metabolic transformation in mice,
a small fraction of CNO is apparently metabolized to clozapine in
humans and guinea pigs, lessening the translational potential of DREADDs.
To effectively translate the DREADD technology, the next generation
of DREADD agonists are needed and a thorough understanding of structure–activity
relationships (SARs) of DREADDs is required for developing such ligands.
We therefore conducted the first SAR studies of hM3Dq. We explored
multiple regions of the scaffold represented by CNO, identified interesting
SAR trends, and discovered several compounds that are very potent
hM3Dq agonists but do not activate the native human M3 receptor (hM3).
We also discovered that the approved drug perlapine is a novel hM3Dq
agonist with >10 000-fold selectivity for hM3Dq over hM3.