Targeted covalent inhibitors are compounds which inhibit the activity of a given target by binding covalently to it. The covalent bond is formed between a non-catalytic amino acid residue of the enzyme and the electrophilic functional group of covalent inhibitor. Targeted covalent inhibitors are commonly designed by attaching the electrophilic warheads to known reversible inhibitors. Monoamine oxidase (MAO) is a flavoenzyme located at the outside of the mitochondrial membrane, and catalyses the deamination of amines. In humans, two isoforms of MAO are known, namely MAO-A and MAO-B, which have 70% structural similarity. Nonetheless, they differ in the size and shape of active site and the substrate specificity. Selective inhibition of the MAO-A enzyme is to be achieved primarily in the treatment of depressive conditions resulting from serotonin and norepinephrine deficiency.
In the Master's thesis presented herein, we attempted to designe and synthesize irreversible selective inhibitors of MAO-A based on the structure of toloxatone, a known reversible MAO-A inhibitor. By attaching the vinyl sulfone fragment as electrophilic warhead to the toloxatone core, we sought to achieve covalent irreversible binding to cysteines Cys321 and Cys323 located near the active site of MAO-A enzyme that are proven to be good nucleophiles.
A sequential synthetic path consisting of six steps was used to prepare toloxatone derivatives, in which cyclization to the oxazolidin-2-one ring and sulfide oxidation were two curcial reactions. Meta and para positional isomers were synthesized and evaluated biochemically on isolated recombinant human MAO-A and MAO-B. We successfully synthesized 6 final compounds (10, 14, 16, 18, 21 and 22). Compound 10 (IC50 = 32.66 ± 3.03 µM), containing the vinyl sulfone fragment at the para position relative to oxazolidin-2-one ring, was the most potent MAO-A inhibitor among the synthesized compounds. Compounds 21 and 22 that possessed the methyl group instead of the electrophilic moieties also displayed low micromolar inhibition of MAO-A. Despite bearing the electrophilic warhead, compound 10 inhibited MAO-A in a reversible and non-time-dependent manner as demonstrated by reversibility and inhibition time-dependency assays, respectively.
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