Three-dimensional pharmacophore screening for fentanyl derivatives

Fentanyl is a highly selective μ-opioid receptor agonist with high analgesic activity. Three-dimensional pharmacophore models were built from a set of 50 fentanyl derivatives. These were employed to elucidate ligand-receptor interactions using information derived only from the ligand structure to identify new potential lead compounds. The present studies demonstrated that three hydrophobic regions, one positive ionizable region and two hydrogen bond acceptor region sites located on the molecule seem to be essential for analgesic activity. The results of the comparative molecular field analysis model suggested that both steric and electrostatic interactions play important roles. The contributions from steric and electrostatic fields for the model were 0.621 and 0.379, respectively. The pharmacophore model provides crucial information about how well the common features of a subject molecule overlap with the hypothesis model, which is very valuable for designing and optimizing new active structures.