Multidrug resistance ABC transporter structure predictions by homology modeling approaches

Human multidrug resistance ABC transporters are ubiquitous membrane proteins responsible for the efflux of multiple, endogenous or exogenous, compounds out of the cells, and therefore they are involved in multi-drug resistance phenotype (MDR). They thus deeply impact the pharmacokinetic parameters and toxicity properties of drugs. A great pressure to develop inhibitors of these pumps is carried out, by either ligand-based drug design or (more ideally) structure-based drug design. In that goal, many biochemical studies have been carried out to characterize their transport functions, and many efforts have been spent to get high-resolution structures. Currently, beside the 3D-structures of bacterial ABC transporters Sav1866 and MsbA, only the mouse ABCB1 complete structure has been published at high-resolution, illustrating the tremendous difficulty in getting such information, taking into account that the human genome accounts for 48 ABC transporters encoding genes. Homology modeling is consequently a reasonable approach to overcome this obstacle. The present review describes, in the first part, the different approaches which have been published to set up human ABC pump 3D-homology models allowing the localization of binding sites for drug candidates, and the identification of critical residues therein. In a second part, the review proposes a more accurate strategy and practical keys to use such biological tools for initiating structure-based drug design.