Influence of ligand geometry on cholinesterase enzyme - A comparison of 1-isoindolinone based structural analog with Donepezil

Abstract Donepezil (DNPZ) is one of the few FDA-approved widely used medication in the clinical care of Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients. To investigate the effect of geometry and to find the significance of an enol form if any in DNPZ on acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibition, we changed the tetrahedral geometry of DNPZ to planar trigonal pyramidal geometry by replacing the α-carbon atom next to ketone functionality with a nitrogen atom. To mimic 1-indanone in DNPZ, we selected 1-isoindolinone framework to synthesize 25 new DNPZ derivatives and characterized using 1H NMR, 13C NMR and ESI-MS spectroscopy methods. Drug likeliness profile for each compound was predicted using Molinspiration online software following Lipinski's rule. Commercially available assay kits were used to measure AChE and butyrylcholinesterase (BuChE) inhibitory effects. NIH/3T3 mouse embryonic fibroblast cell line was used to measure cytotoxic and proliferation effects using LDH and MTT assay, respectively. Compound #20 was selected for comparative computational docking, modelling and physicochemical studies. Our results show that DNPZ with tetrahedral geometry has 3-fold higher AChE inhibition as compared to compound #20 with planar trigonal pyramidal geometry. Our approach may be useful as a novel indirect method to study the significance of the enol form in DNPZ (or similar compounds), since constant interconversion between the keto and enol forms does not permit a direct determination of the effect of the enol form of DNPZ in vivo. Overall, we conclude that the tetrahedral is a better fit and any change in geometry significantly drives down the cholinesterase inhibitory effect of DNPZ.