Design, Synthesis and Biological Evaluation of Small Molecules As Modulators of Histone Methyltransferases and Demethylases
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
PhD School of Pharmaceutical Sciences XXVI cycle University of Naples “Federico II” DESIGN, SYNTHESIS AND BIOLOGICAL EVALUATION OF SMALL MOLECULES AS MODULATORS OF HISTONE METHYLTRANSFERASES AND DEMETHYLASES Doctoral Candidate: Supervisor: Stefano Tomassi Prof. Ettore Novellino Department of Pharmacy Faculty of Pharmacy University of Naples “Federico II” Supervisors Professor Ettore Novellino Ph.D. (tutor and main supervisor) Department of Pharmacy, University of Naples “Federico II”, Via Domenico Montesano, 49 - 80131 Naples, Italy. Adjunct Professor Antonello Mai Ph.D. (external supervisor) Department of Drug Chemistry and Technology, “Sapienza” University of Rome, P.le Aldo Moro, 5 - 00185 - Rome, Italy. 2 Table of contents 1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................. 5 2. EPIGENETIC AND CHROMATIN DYNAMICS ............................................ 8 3. HISTONE METHYLATION ............................................................................. 11 3.1 Protein Arginine Methyltransferases (PRMTs) .......................................... 12 3.2 Histone Lysine Methyltransferases (HKMTs) ............................................ 21 3.2.1 Enhancer of Zeste Homologue 2 (EZH2) .............................................. 27 3.2.2 EZH2 aberrations and cancer ................................................................ 36 3.3 Targeting Histone Arginine and Lysine Methyltransferases .................... 39 4. DESIGN, SYNTHESIS AND BIOLOGICAL EVALUATION OF NOVEL EZH2 HISTONE METHYLTRANSFERASE INHIBITORS ............................ 50 5. HISTONE LYSINE DEMETHYLASES .......................................................... 77 5.1 Lysine Specific Demethylase 1 and 2 (LSD1 and LSD2) ............................ 81 5.2 LSD1 aberrations and cancer ....................................................................... 90 5.3 Targeting Lysine Specific Demethylase 1 .................................................... 92 5.4 Jumonji C domain-containing demethylases (JMJDs) .............................. 96 5.5 Targeting Jumonji C domain-containing demethylases .......................... 103 6. PAN-HISTONE DEMETHYLASE INHIBITORS SIMULTANEOUSLY TARGETING JUMONJI C AND LYSINE SPECIFIC DEMETHYLASES DISPLAY HIGH ANTICANCER ACTIVITIES ............................................... 107 7. REFERENCES .................................................................................................. 136 3 A mio padre Roberto Tomassi 4 1. INTRODUCTION Eukaryotic organisms have developed elaborate cellular mechanisms to endow themselves with differential and cell-type specific expression of genes. Born nearly in 1997, Epigenetics, which literally means “upon genetics”, refers to these mechanisms and can be defined as changes in state of genes functions and expressions (“on” versus “off”) that are mitotically and/or meiotically heritable and do not entail a change in DNA sequence. This means that it concerns how eukaryotic DNA, and so chromatin, is distinctively accessed in cells during embryonic development and differentiation; and finally how the chromatin states are maintained/changed, not only during the normal life of a cell but from a generation of cells to an another one in multicellular organisms. The dynamic nature of the epigenetic state of cells thus offers a pre-ordered scheme for the development and the differentiation of organisms, moreover their changes empower cells of environmental plasticity enabling cellular reprogramming and responses to the changing outward conditions. Notwithstanding the notable precision of these mechanisms, mistakes may occur, and when not appropriately correct, they may lead to aberrant expression and/or silencing of critical downstream target genes, with far-reaching implication in the most fields of cell biology and human health, including: viral latency, somatic gene therapy, cloning and transgenic technologies, metabolic, cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases and remarkably in cancer. For many years oncogenesys has been deemed the outcome of multistep processes involving irreversible genetic defects as gene mutations, deletions and chromosomical aberrations, leading to loss or gain of function of oncosuppressor genes and oncogenes, respectively. However, recent studies have underlined how these processes involved an imbalance of normal molecular signalling pathways that regulate the cellular proliferation and differentiation and how Epigenetics plays a pivotal role in the activation and/or repression of these programs during the normal cell cycle. In the late ’70 Lewis and Lewis elegantly showed how critical a fine-tuned epigenetic regulation for the functional development of an organism might be. Upon mutations of a set of genes on drosophila melanogaster (Polycomb genes), specific body segments of the 5 mutants assume the identity of a completely different, but otherwise normal, body segment. This is the case of adult animals having legs in the place of antennas. The authors also investigated the biochemical mechanisms underlying the aberrant phenotypes and found that Polycomb (PC) mutations caused inappropriate reactivation of genes that should have been repressed and are responsible for segment identity. Their reactivation leads the body segments to assume new character (the antenna-leg transformation). The Lewis and Lewis findings opened the way to new and more focused analysis on the chromatin on/off state, its modulators (or on/off switchers) and their implication on both normal and pathological conditions as neurological diseases, immunological disorders and several types of cancer. In particular numerous evidences link deregulated epigenetic networks to the loss of function and propagation of cancer cells and more in general to the development and also relapse of different tumours. Reinstating a correct epigenetic regulation is a current therapeutic goal in cancer, the importance of which can be better understood considering the heterogenic and multiple nature of tumour cells. Several hypotheses exist accounting for this peculiarity, the most important being the cancer stem cell hypothesis and the clonal evolution model. The first hypothesis states that only a rare subset of cells (the so called “cancer stem cells” or CSCs) is responsible for the maintenance of the neoplasm. The cancer stem cells start the propagation and according to the clonal evolution model, lead to different clonal subset in which different genetic abnormalities are present. In this way the evolutionary pressure allows the sequential selection of the most aggressive subpopulations. The propagation and renewal of the cancer stem cells could arise from an inappropriate reactivation of some developmental pathways, due to the ability of the tumour-propagating cells to hijacked cellular networks that control the normal behaviour of an adult stem cell. The reactivation of developmental pathways involves both genetic defects and epigenetic alterations, which might be responsible for the evolution of new cancer cell lineages by disrupting the expression of oncogenes and oncosuppressor genes that lies at the basis of a normal cell development and differentiation. The concrete possibility of completely reversing the aberrant epigenetic regulation by tackling down the biochemical mediators of chromatin remodelling with small molecules inhibitors has greatly focused the attention on 6 chromatin modifying enzymes as targets and promising clinical trials have boost both the academic and private epigenetic research programs. Unfortunately, the suitable set of enzymes to inhibit, in order to restore or shut down the expression of target genes, has been proved difficult to find. This is mainly due to the inner complexity of the rules dictating the chromatin state, where even small modifications of the proteins structure will correspond to critical changes on genes expression and functions. Chromatin modifications are generally of a covalent type, as acetylation and methylation. Several different families of specific enzymes exist, for the vast majority of them, inhibitors have been designed, synthesized and tested, some of which have also shown potent and selective activity both in vitro and in vivo. Anyway new and more potent compounds are needed to modulate different target activities and change specific patterns of covalent modifications to achieve the desired therapeutic goal. Several techniques generally adopted in the pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) have been applied to this scope. For example high throughput screening (HTS) in concert with bioinformatics techniques is responsible for early identifying most of the molecules currently tested. Moreover the number of currently HTS compatible biological assays is continuously increasing allowing a growing number of chemical scaffolds to be tested. Also the number of experimentally solved chromatin modifying enzymes crystal structure available in the protein data bank (PDB) is becoming bigger and bigger, constituting a valuable tool for computational and medicinal chemists to analyse and explore the physicochemical characteristic specific for a particular protein, gain insight in the relationship between its structure and function and make a set of rules necessary to build inhibitors not just more potent but also with a range of activity covering different enzymes at once. All these different approaches gathered together will likely lead to better “hits” and will help medicinal