Identification of V6.51L as a selectivity hotspot in stereoselective A2B adenosine receptor antagonist recognition

Abstract

Abstract The four adenosine receptors (ARs) A1AR, A2AAR, A2BAR, and A3AR are G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) for which an exceptional amount of experimental and structural data is available. Still, limited success has been achieved in getting new chemical modulators on the market. As such, there is a clear interest in the design of novel selective chemical entities for this family of receptors. In this work, we investigate the selective recognition of ISAM-140, a recently reported A2BAR reference antagonist. A combination of semipreparative chiral HPLC, circular dichroism and X-ray crystallography was used to separate and unequivocally assign the configuration of each enantiomer. Subsequently affinity evaluation for both A2A and A2B receptors demonstrate the stereospecific and selective recognition of (S)-ISAM140 to the A2BAR. The molecular modeling suggested that the structural determinants of this selectivity profile would be residue V2506.51 in A2BAR, which is a leucine in all other ARs including the closely related A2AAR. This was herein confirmed by radioligand binding assays and rigorous free energy perturbation (FEP) calculations performed on the L249V6.51 mutant A2AAR receptor. Taken together, this study provides further insights in the binding mode of these A2BAR antagonists, paving the way for future ligand optimization.