Rational design of an enzyme mutant for anti-cocaine therapeutics

(−)-Cocaine is a widely abused drug and there is no available anti-cocaine therapeutic. The disastrous medical and social consequences of cocaine addiction have made the development of an effective pharmacological treatment a high priority. An ideal anti-cocaine medication would be to accelerate (−)-cocaine metabolism producing biologically inactive metabolites. The main metabolic pathway of cocaine in body is the hydrolysis at its benzoyl ester group. Reviewed in this article is the state-of-the-art computational design of high-activity mutants of human butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) against (−)-cocaine. The computational design of BChE mutants have been based on not only the structure of the enzyme, but also the detailed catalytic mechanisms for BChE-catalyzed hydrolysis of (−)-cocaine and (+)-cocaine. Computational studies of the detailed catalytic mechanisms and the structure-and-mechanism-based computational design have been carried out through the combined use of a variety of state-of-the-art techniques of molecular modeling. By using the computational insights into the catalytic mechanisms, a recently developed unique computational design strategy based on the simulation of the rate-determining transition state has been employed to design high-activity mutants of human BChE for hydrolysis of (−)-cocaine, leading to the exciting discovery of BChE mutants with a considerably improved catalytic efficiency against (−)-cocaine. One of the discovered BChE mutants (i.e., A199S/S287G/A328W/Y332G) has a ∼456-fold improved catalytic efficiency against (−)-cocaine. The encouraging outcome of the computational design and discovery effort demonstrates that the unique computational design approach based on the transition-state simulation is promising for rational enzyme redesign and drug discovery.