Evaluating the ability of end-point methods to predict the binding affinity tendency of protein kinase inhibitors

Because of the high economic cost of exploring the experimental impact of mutations occurring in kinase proteins, computational approaches have been employed as alternative methods for evaluating the structural and energetic aspects of kinase mutations. Among the main computational methods used to explore the affinity linked to kinase mutations are docking procedures and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations combined with end-point methods or alchemical methods. Although it is known that end-point methods are not able to reproduce experimental binding free energy (ΔG) values, it is also true that they are able to discriminate between a better or a worse ligand through the estimation of ΔG. In this contribution, we selected ten wild-type and mutant cocrystallized EGFR-inhibitor complexes containing experimental binding affinities to evaluate whether MMGBSA or MMPBSA approaches can predict the differences in affinity between the wild type and mutants forming a complex with a similar inhibitor. Our results show that a long MD simulation (the last 50 ns of a 100 ns-long MD simulation) using the MMGBSA method without considering the entropic components reproduced the experimental affinity tendency with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.779 and an R² value of 0.606. On the other hand, the correlation between theoretical and experimental ΔΔG values indicates that the MMGBSA and MMPBSA methods are helpful for obtaining a good correlation using a short rather than a long simulation period.