Investigations of FAK inhibitors: a combination of 3D-QSAR, docking, and molecular dynamics simulations studies

Abstract

Focal adhesion kinase (FAK) is one kind of tyrosine kinases that modulates integrin and growth factor signaling pathways, which is a promising therapeutic target because of involving in cancer cell migration, proliferation, and survival. To investigate the mechanism between FAK and triazinic inhibitors and design high activity inhibitors, a molecular modeling integrated with 3D-QSAR, molecular docking, molecular dynamics simulations, and binding free energy calculations was performed. The optimum CoMFA and CoMSIA models showed good reliability and satisfactory predictability (with Q² = 0.663, R² = 0.987,  = 0.921 and Q² = 0.670, R² = 0.981,  = 0.953). Its contour maps could provide structural features to improve inhibitory activity. Furthermore, a good consistency between contour maps, docking, and molecular dynamics simulations strongly demonstrates that the molecular modeling is reliable. Based on it, we designed several new compounds and their inhibitory activities were validated by the molecular models. We expect our studies could bring new ideas to promote the development of novel inhibitors with higher inhibitory activity for FAK.

Keywords:

• FAK
• 3D-QSAR
• molecular dynamics
• binding mechanism
• molecular design
• ADME/T

Acknowledgment

We appreciate the program of National Natural Science Foundation of China [NSFC, No. 21275067] for the financial support of this work.