The structure of a dendrimer exhibits a large number of internal and superficial cavities, which can be exploited, to capture and deliver small organic molecules, enabling their use in drug delivery. Structure-based modeling and quantum mechanical studies can be used to accurately understand the interactions between functionalized dendrimers and molecules of pharmaceutical and industrial interest. In this study, we implemented a Metropolis Monte Carlo algorithm to calculate the interaction energy of dendrimer-drug complexes, which can be used for in silico prediction of dendrimer-drug affinity. Initially, a large-scale sampling of different dendrimer-drug conformations was generated using Euler angles. Then, each conformation was distributed on different nodes of a GRID computational system, where its interaction energy was calculated by semiempirical quantum mechanical methods. These energy calculations were performed for four different nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, each showing different affinities for the PAMAM-G4 dendrimer. The affinities were also characterized experimentally by using Cooks' kinetic method to calculate PAMAM-drug dissociation constants. The quantitative structure-activity relationship between the interaction energies and dissociation constants showed statistical correlations with r(2) > 0.9.
© 2012 American Chemical Society