Medicinal polypharmacology: Exploration and exploitation of the polypharmacolome in modern drug development

Medicinal Polypharmacology in the Clinic - Translating the Polypharmacolome into Therapeutic Benefit

Drugs with multiple targets, often annotated as 'unselective', 'promiscuous', 'multitarget', or 'polypharmacological', are widely considered in both academic and industrial research as a high risk due to the likelihood of adverse effects. However, retrospective analyses have shown that particularly approved drugs bear rich polypharmacological profiles. This raises the question whether our perception of the specificity paradigm ('one drug-one target concept') is correct - and if specifically multitarget drugs should be developed instead of being rejected. These questions provoke a paradigm shift - regarding the development of polypharmacological drugs not as a 'waste of investment', but acknowledging the existence of a 'lack of investment'. This perspective provides an insight into modern drug development highlighting latest drug candidates that have not been assessed in a broader polypharmacology-based context elsewhere embedded in a historic framework of classical and modern approved multitarget drugs. The article shall be an inspiration to the scientific community to re-consider current standards, and more, to evolve to a better understanding of polypharmacology from a challenge to an opportunity.

HD_BPMDS: a curated binary pattern multitarget dataset of Huntington's disease-targeting agents

The discovery of both distinctive lead molecules and novel drug targets is a great challenge in drug discovery, which particularly accounts for orphan diseases. Huntington's disease (HD) is an orphan, neurodegenerative disease of which the pathology is well-described. However, its pathophysiological background and molecular mechanisms are poorly understood. To date, only 2 drugs have been approved on the US and European markets, both of which address symptomatic aspects of this disease only. Although several hundreds of agents were described with efficacy against the HD phenotype in in vitro and/or in vivo models, a successful translation into clinical use is rarely achieved. Two major impediments are, first, the lack of awareness and understanding of the interactome-the sum of key proteins, cascades, and mediators-that contributes to HD initiation and progression; and second, the translation of the little gained knowledge into useful model systems. To counteract this lack of data awareness, we manually compiled and curated the entire modulator landscape of successfully evaluated pre-clinical small-molecule HD-targeting agents which are annotated with substructural molecular patterns, physicochemical properties, as well as drug targets, and which were linked to benchmark databases such as PubChem, ChEMBL, or UniProt. Particularly, the annotation with substructural molecular patterns expressed as binary code allowed for the generation of target-specific and -unspecific fingerprints which could be used to determine the (poly)pharmacological profile of molecular-structurally distinct molecules.