Advanced Activity-Based Protein Profiling Application Strategies for Drug Development

Drug targets and modes of action remain two of the biggest challenges in drug development. To address these problems, chemical proteomic approaches have been introduced to profile targets in complex proteomes. Activity-based protein profiling (ABPP) is one of a growing number chemical proteomic approaches that uses small-molecule chemical probes to understand the interaction mechanisms between compounds and targets. ABPP can be used to identify the protein targets of small molecules and even the active sites of target proteins. This review focuses on the overall workflow of the ABPP technology and on additional advanced strategies for target identification and/or drug discovery. Herein, we mainly describe the design strategies for small-molecule probes and discuss the ways in which these probes can be used to identify targets and even validate the interactions of small molecules with targets. In addition, we discuss some basic strategies that have been developed to date, such as click chemistry-ABPP, competitive strategies and, recently, more advanced strategies, including isoTOP-ABPP, fluoPol-ABPP, and qNIRF-ABPP. The isoTOP-ABPP strategy has been coupled with quantitative proteomics to identify the active sites of proteins and explore whole proteomes with specific amino acid profiling. FluoPol-ABPP combined with HTS can be used to discover new compounds for some substrate-free enzymes. The qNIRF-ABPP strategy has a number of applications for in vivo imaging. In this review, we will further discuss the applications of these advanced strategies.