The Quest to Identify USP8 Inhibitors for Parkinsons Disease, a PAINful Experience.

Abstract

Pan Assay INterference compoundS (PAINS) are known to be a source of false positives in High Throughput Screening (HTS) campaigns. This has become a major problem in medicinal chemistry, often resulting in undesirable project outcomes and increased overall cost. Our recent campaign to identify inhibitors of USP8 that could be used in the treatment of Parkinsons disease identified several PAINS that worked via a variety of mechanisms. Herein, we discuss the process developed to identify not only the PAINS but also confirming the interference mechanism causing their activity. We found in this project that our USP8 assay was susceptible to multiple modes of interference, making it difficult to identify genuine hit molecules. O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=132 SRC="FIGDIR/small/556294v1_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (17K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@b917a6org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1bfac47org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@c78e1dorg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1434fdd_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG