HKMTIs · Computer-aided Design and synthesis of inhibitors of EED-EZH2 interaction as a novel approach for anticancer therapy

The Polycomb repressive complex (PRC2) complex catalyzes the trimethylation of lysine 27 on histone H3 (H3K27me3), which is an important epigenetic mark for maintaining transcriptional repression. The interaction between the two of the components, EED and EZH2, of PRC2 is essential for the required histone lysine methyltransferase (HKMTase) activity that resides in the SET-domain of EZH2. We propose to design the inhibitors of EED-EZH2 interaction using the recently reported X-ray crystal structure of the complex and employing computational drug design methods. A stepwise rational approach will be employed that would involve, identifying a binding sites around the important amino acid residues of EED, structure-based pharmacophore generation, virtual screening, structure optimization and biological screening, in order to discovery the novel HKMTase inhibitors