3D QSAR studies, pharmacophore modeling, and virtual screening of diarylpyrazole–benzenesulfonamide derivatives as a template to obtain new inhibitors, using human carbonic anhydrase II as a model protein

Abstract

A 3D-QSAR modeling was performed on a series of diarylpyrazole-benzenesulfonamide derivatives acting as inhibitors of the metalloenzyme carbonic anhydrase (CA, EC 4.2.1.1). The compounds were collected from two datasets with the same scaffold, and utilized as a template for a new pharmacophore model to screen the ZINC database of commercially available derivatives. The datasets were divided into training, test, and validation sets. As the first step, comparative molecular field analysis (CoMFA), CoMFA region focusing and comparative molecular similarity indices analysis (CoMSIA) in parallel with docking studies were applied to a set of 41 human (h) CA II inhibitors. The validity and the prediction capacity of the resulting models were evaluated by leave-one-out (LOO) cross-validation approach. The reliability of the model for the prediction of possibly new CA inhibitors was also tested.

Keywords:

• Carbonic anhydrase isoform II
• molecular docking
• pharmacophore
• sulfonamide
• virtual screening

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to extend their sincere gratitude to Dr. Payam Saadat, Business Management Professor at City University of Seattle, for providing technical support, fruitful discussions and editing the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The authors report that they have no conflicts of interest.