A multi-spectroscopic and computational simulations study to delineate the interaction between antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine and human serum albumin

Abstract

Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), a quinoline based medicine is commonly used to treat malaria and autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. Since, human serum albumin (HSA) serves as excipient for vaccines or therapeutic protein drugs, it is important to understand the effect of HCQ on the structural stability of HSA. In this study, the binding mechanism of HCQ and their effect on stability of HSA have been studied using various spectroscopic techniques and molecular dynamic simulation. The UV-VIS results confirmed the strong binding of HCQ with HSA. The calculated thermodynamics parameters confirmed that binding is spontaneous in nature and van der Waals forces and hydrogen bonding are involved in the binding system which is also confirmed by molecular docking results. The steady-state fluorescence confirms the static quenching mechanism in the interaction system, which was further validated by time-resolved fluorescence. The synchronous fluorescence confirmed the more abrupt binding of HCQ with tryptophan residue of HSA compared to Tyr residue of HSA. Isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC) was done to validate the thermodynamics parameters of HSA-HCQ complex in one experiment, supporting the values obtained from the spectroscopic techniques. The circular dichroism (CD) demonstrated that the HCQ affected the secondary structure of HSA protein by reducing their α-helical content. The docking and molecular dynamic simulation results further helped in understanding the effect of HCQ on conformational changes of HSA. Overall, present work defined the physicochemical properties and interaction mechanism of HCQ with HSA that have extensively been elucidated by both in vitro and in silico approaches.

Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma

KEYWORDS:

• Hydroxychloroquine
• human serum albumin
• time-resolved fluorescence
• circular dichroism
• molecular simulation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

MA and SS gratefully acknowledge the financial support in the form of Core Research Grant from Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), Govt. of India (Project No. CRG/2018/003967). RP greatly acknowledges the financial support from Science and Engineering Research Board (EEQ/2020/000437) New Delhi, India. Drug and Pharmaceuticals Research Programe (DPRP) (Project No. P/569/2016-1/TDT) for SS is acknowledged. KA acknowledges the non-NET fellowship granted by UGC. AU is a recipient of Senior Research Fellowship from ICMR (Fellowship/48/2019-ECD-II). Mofieed Ahmed is thankful to CSIR-UGC for providing the JRF-fellowship (Id: 11-04-2016-326346).