Screening of thiourea derivatives and carbonyl-2-aminothiazole derivatives for potential CCR4 antagonists using capillary zone electrophoresis

CC chemokine receptor 4 (CCR4) is a kind of G-protein-coupled receptors with a characteristic seven-transmembrane structure and selectively expressed on Th2-type CD4+ T-cells. CCR4 has been identified as a potentially important drug target for the treatment of T cell-mediated allergic inflammatory diseases. In this study, a novel series of CCR4 antagonists were screened by investigating the interactions between the compounds and the human CCR4 N-terminal peptide ML40 using capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) for the first time. Both qualitative and quantitative characterizations of the compound-peptide binding were determined. The results showed that, compared with positive control, ten of the compounds were interacted with ML40, which were A3C223, A3C231, A4C238, A3C241, A4C241, A4C239, ZXF0337, ZXF0432, ZXF0519 and ZXF0637A, and their binding constants were calculated from the Scatchard plot by regression. The binding constants of the compounds to ML40 were calculated and the binding constant of ZXF0432 was the largest among them [(7.6334 ± 0.1907) × 104 M−1]. Here, a sensitive and selective high-performance analytical method based on CZE was developed for screening of thiourea derivatives and C-arbonyl-2-aminothiazole derivatives for potential CCR4 antagonists for the first time. The methodology presented should be generally applicable to study compounds-ML40 interactions as a powerful, sensitive and fast screening method for CCR4 antagonist discovery.