Discovery of andrographolide hit analog as a potent cyclooxygenase-2 inhibitor through consensus MD-simulation, electrostatic potential energy simulation and ligand efficiency metrics

Cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) is the key enzyme responsible for the conversion of arachidonic acid to prostaglandins that display pro-inflammatory properties and thus, it is a potential target protein to develop anti-inflammatory drugs. In this study, chemical and bio-informatics approaches have been employed to find a novel potent andrographolide (AGP) analog as a COX-2 inhibitor having better pharmacological properties than aspirin and rofecoxib (controls). The full amino acid sequenced human Alpha fold (AF) COX-2 protein (604AA) was selected and validated for its accuracy against the reported COX-2 protein structures (PDB ID: 5F19, 5KIR, 5F1A, 5IKQ and 1V0X) followed by multiple sequence alignment analysis to establish the sequence conservation. The systematic virtual screening of 237 AGP analogs against AF-COX-2 protein yielded 22 lead compounds based on the binding energy score (< − 8.0 kcal/mol). These were further screened out to 7 analogs by molecular docking analysis and investigated further for ADMET prediction, ligand efficiency metrics calculations, quantum mechanical analysis, MD simulation, electrostatic potential energy (EPE) docking simulation, and MM/GBSA. In-depth analysis revealed that AGP analog A3 (3-[2-[(1R,4aR,5R,6R,8aR)-6-hydroxy-5,6,8a-trimethyl-2-methylidene-3,4,4a,5,7,8-hexahydro-1H-naphthalen-1-yl]ethylidene]-4-hydroxyoxolan-2-one) forms the most stable complex with the AF-COX-2 showing the least RMSD value (0.37 ± 0.03 nm), a good number of hydrogen bonds (protein–ligand H-bond = 11, and protein H-bond = 525), minimum EPE score (− 53.81 kcal/mol), and lowest MM-GBSA before and after simulation (− 55.37 and − 56.25 kcal/mol, respectively) value compared to other analogs and controls. Thus, we suggest that the identified A3 AGP analog could be developed as a promising plant-based anti-inflammatory drug by inhibiting COX-2.