In-silico Modeling of Chemokine Receptor CCR2 And CCR5 to Assist the Design of Effective and Selective Antagonists

Chemokine receptor antagonists have potential applications in field of drug discovery. Although the chemokine receptors are G-protein-coupled receptors, their cognate ligands are small proteins (8 to 12 kDa), and so inhibiting the ligand/receptor interaction has been challenging. The application of structure-based in-silico methods to drug discovery is still considered a major challenge, especially when the x-ray structure of the target protein is unknown. Such is the case with human CCR2 and CCR5, the most important members of the chemokine receptor family and also a potential drug target. Herein, we review the success stories of combined receptor modeling/mutagenesis approach to probe the allosteric nature of chemokine receptor binding by small molecule antagonists for CCR2 and CCR5 using Rhodopsin as template. We also urged the importance of recently available β2-andrenergic receptor as an alternate template to guide mutagenesis. The results demonstrate the usefulness and robustness of in-silico 3D models. These models could also be useful for the design of novel and potent CCR2 and CCR5 antagonists using structure based drug design