Carboxylesterases (CEs) are important enzymes that catalyze biological detoxification, hydrolysis of certain pesticides, and metabolism of many esterified drugs. The development of inhibitors for CE has many potential uses, including increasing drug lifetime and altering biodistrubution; reducing or abrogating toxicity of metabolized drugs; and reducing pest resistance to insecticides. In this review, we discuss the major classes of known mammalian CE inhibitors and describe our computational efforts to design new scaffolds for development of novel, selective inhibitors. We discuss several strategies for in silico inhibitor development, including structure docking, database searching, multidimensional quantitative structure activity analysis (QSAR), and a newly-used approach that uses QSAR combined with de novo drug design. While our research is focused on design of specific inhibitors for human intestinal carboxylesterase (hiCE), the methods described are generally applicable to inhibitors of other enzymes, including CE from other tissues and organisms.
Keywords: CPT-11; QSAR; drug design; irinotecan; modeling; molecular dynamics.