Potential Inhibitors of Fascin From A Database of Marine Natural Products: A Virtual Screening and Molecular Dynamics Study

Marine nature products are unique compounds that are produced by the marine environment including plants, animals, and microorganisms. The wide diversity of marine natural products have great potential and are versatile in terms of drug discovery. In this paper, we use state-of-the-art computational methods to discover inhibitors from marine natural products to block the function of Fascin, an overexpressed protein in various cancers. First, virtual screening (pharmacophore model and molecular docking) was carried out based on a marine natural products database (12015 molecules) and provided eighteen molecules that could potentially inhibit the function of Fascin. Next, molecular mechanics generalized Born surface area (MM/GBSA) calculations were conducted and indicated that four molecules have higher binding affinities than the inhibitor NP-G2-029, which was validated experimentally. ADMET analyses of pharmacokinetics demonstrated that one of the four molecules does not match the criterion. Finally, ligand Gaussian accelerated molecular dynamics (LiGaMD) simulations were carried out to validate the three inhibitors binding to Fascin stably. In addition, dynamic interactions between protein and ligands were analyzed systematically. Our study will accelerate the development of the cancer drugs targeting Fascin.