Virtual docking screening and QSAR studies to explore AKT and mTOR inhibitors acting on PI3K in cancers

The phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) pathway is an important regulator of cell proliferation and metabolism. PI3K activation initiates a signal transduction cascade, of which the major effectors are the kinases AKT and mTOR. Aberrant activation of the PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway is frequently observed in many human malignancies and the combination of compounds simultaneously targeting different related molecules in the PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway leads to synergistic activity. To explore the competing common ATP inhibitors PI3K/AKT and PI3K/mTOR we developed a model PI3K-SAR 2D which made it possible to predict the bioactivity of inhibitors of AKT and mTOR towards PI3K; the interaction of the best inhibitors was evaluated by docking analysis and compared to that of dactolisib and pictilisib. A PI3K-SAR model with a correlation coefficient (R2) of 0.81706 and an RMSE of 0.16029 was obtained, which was validated and evaluated by a cross-validation method, LOO. The most predicted AKT and mTOR inhibitors present respectively pIC50 activities between 9.26–9.93 and 9.59–9.87.

After docking and several comparisons, inhibitors with better predictions showed better affinity and interaction with PI3K compared to pictilisib and dactolisib, so we found that 4 inhibitors of AKT and 14 mTOR inhibitors met the criteria of Lipinski and Veber and could be future drugs.