GCK is a protein that plays a crucial role in the sensing and regulation of glucose homeostasis, which associates it with disorders of carbohydrate metabolism and the development of several pathologies, including gestational diabetes. This makes GCK an important therapeutic target that has aroused the interest of researchers to discover GKA that are simultaneously effective in the long term and free of side effects. TNKS is a protein that interacts directly with GCK; recent studies have shown that it inhibits GCK action, which affects glucose detection and insulin secretion. This justifies our choice of TNKS inhibitors as ligands to test their effects on the GCK-TNKS complex. For this purpose, we investigated the interaction of the GCK-TNKS complex with 13 compounds (TNKS inhibitors and their analogues) using the molecular docking approach as a first step, after which the compounds that generated the best affinity scores were evaluated for drug similarity and pharmacokinetic properties. Subsequently, we selected the six compounds that generated high affinity and that were in accordance with the parameters of the drug rules as well as pharmacokinetic properties to ensure a molecular dynamics study. The results allowed us to favor the two compounds (XAV939 and IWR-1), knowing that even the tested compounds (TNKS 22, (2215914) and (46824343)) produced good results that can also be exploited. These results are therefore interesting and encouraging, and they can be exploited experimentally to discover a treatment for diabetes, including gestational diabetes.Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma.
Keywords: ADMET; GKA; Glucokinase; TNKS inhibitor; molecular docking; molecular dynamics; tankyrase.