[Molecular modeling studies of prolyl endopeptidase inhibitors]

Prolyl endopeptidase, a serine protease is considered to play an important role in the degradation of neuropeptides capable of changing the performance in learning and memory tasks in both animal and human. The inhibitors seem to be promising drug candidates to treat and prevent diseases with associated memory loss such as senile dementia. In the last decade advanced and improved new technologies have appeared to stimulate ideas in the design and synthesis of new drug molecules. The goal of this short communication is to review our results and observations, exemplified by our research on the inhibitors of prolyl endopeptidase. Among them qualitative and quantitative structure-activity relationship studies using conformational analyses, NMR measurements, pharmacophoric plots and CoMFA models are summarised.