Comparative virtual and experimental high-throughput screening for glycogen synthase kinase-3beta inhibitors

Glycogen synthase kinase-3beta (GSK-3beta) is a serine/threonine kinase that has recently emerged as a key target for neurodegenerative diseases and diabetes. As an initial step of our lead discovery program, we developed a virtual screen to discriminate known GSK-3beta inhibitors and inactive compounds using FlexX, FlexX-Pharm, and FlexE. The maximal enrichment factor (EF = 28) suggests that our protocol identifies potential GSK-3beta inhibitors effectively from large compound collections. The effectiveness of our screening protocol was further investigated by comparative experimental and virtual high-throughput screens (HTSs) performed for the same subset of our corporate library. Enrichment factors, the significantly higher hit rate of virtual screening (12.9%) than that of the HTS (0.55%), and also the comparison of active clusters suggest that our virtual screening protocol is an effective tool in GSK-3beta-based library focusing. Head-to-head comparison of true/false positives and negatives revealed the two approaches to be complementary rather than competitive.