Receptor-based pharmacophore modeling, virtual screening, and molecular docking studies for the discovery of novel GSK-3β inhibitors

Considering the emerging importance of glycogen synthase kinase 3 beta (GSK-3β) inhibitors in treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, multi-protein structure receptor-based pharmacophore modeling was adopted to generate a 3D pharmacophore model for (GSK-3β) inhibitors. The generated 3D pharmacophore was then validated using a test set of 1235 compounds. The ZINCPharmer web tool was used to virtually screen the public ZINC database using the generated 3D pharmacophore. A set of 12,251 hits was produced and then filtered according to their lead-like properties, predicted central nervous system (CNS) activity, and Pan-assay interference compounds (PAINS) fragments to 630 compounds. Scaffold Hunter was then used to cluster the filtered compounds according to their chemical structure framework. From the different clusters, 123 compounds were selected to cover the whole chemical space of the obtained hits. The SwissADME online tool was then used to filter out the compounds with undesirable pharmacokinetic properties giving a set of 91 compounds with promising predicted pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic properties. To confirm their binding capability to the GSK-3β binding site, molecular docking simulations were performed for the final 91 compounds in the GSK-3β binding site. Twenty-five compounds showed acceptable binding poses that bind to the key amino acids in the binding site Asp133 and Val135 with good binding scores. The quinolin-2-one derivative ZINC67773573 was found to be a promising lead for designing new GSK-3β inhibitors for Alzheimer’s disease treatment.