Strategy for generation of new TACE inhibitors: Pharmacophore and counter pharmacophore modeling to remove non-selective hits

Present study describes the ligand-based molecular modeling along with virtual screening (VS) approach for generation of new tumor necrosis factor-α converting enzyme (TACE) inhibitors. In ligand-based molecular modeling, two statistically reliable HipHop pharmacophore models Hip1 and counter pharmacophore (CP1) were generated using training set of 3 and 2 molecules, respectively. CP1 was generated using inhibitors of MMP-1 (matrix metalloproteinase-1), an important enzyme involved in musculoskeletal degradation. VS was performed with model Hip1 in in-house database of 1.2 million molecules. In addition, the retrieved molecules were screened with CP1. The combination of both models helped for generating new improved TACE inhibitor molecules.