Virtual Screening and Binding Analysis of Potential CD58 Inhibitors in Colorectal Cancer (CRC)

Human cell surface receptor CD58, also known as lymphocyte function-associated antigen 3 (LFA-3), plays a critical role in the early stages of immune response through interacting with CD2. Recent research identified CD58 as a surface marker of colorectal cancer (CRC), which can upregulate the Wnt pathway and promote self-renewal of colorectal tumor-initiating cells (CT-ICs) by degradation of Dickkopf 3. In addition, it was also shown that knockdown of CD58 significantly impaired tumor growth. In this study, we developed a structure-based virtual screening pipeline using Autodock Vina and binding analysis and identified a group of small molecular compounds having the potential to bind with CD58. Five of them significantly inhibited the growth of the SW620 cell line in the following in vitro studies. Their proposed binding models were further verified by molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, and some pharmaceutically relevant chemical and physical properties were predicted. The hits described in this work may be considered interesting leads or structures for the development of new and more efficient CD58 inhibitors.