Title: A practical use of ligand efficiency indices out of the fragment-based approach: ligand efficiency-guided lead identification of soluble epoxide hydrolase inhibitors.

Abstract: Ligand efficiency is frequently used to evaluate fragment compounds in fragment-based drug discovery. We applied ligand efficiency indices in a conventional virtual screening-initiated lead generation study of soluble epoxide hydrolase inhibitors. From a considerable number of screening hits, we carefully selected a compound exhibiting relatively weak inhibitory activity but high ligand efficiency. This ligand efficiency-guided selection could reveal compounds possessing preferable lead-like characteristics in terms of molecular size and lipophilicity. The following hit-to-lead medicinal chemistry campaign successfully led to a more potent, ADMET-clean, lead-like compound preserving high ligand efficiency. Retrospective analyses, including consideration of the more recently proposed indices of ligand efficiency, shed light on the validity of our hit triage and hit-to-lead studies. The present work proposes a practical methodology for lead generation using the concept of ligand efficiency.
(PMID: 21192659)

Compounds with activity <= 50uM or explicitly reported as active by ChEMBL are flagged as active in this PubChem assay presentation.

ChEMBL Assay Type: Binding

ChEMBL Assay Data Source: Scientific Literature

ChEMBL Target ID: 11727

ChEMBL target type: Target is a single protein chain