Year 2

During the past reporting period (months 18-24 of this grant), we have made progress towards all three milestones. Major progress in Milestone 1 was made by identifying 391 compounds in 10 lead classes that will be developed further in a secondary fragment-based screen. While the goal of identifying lead class compounds with BCL6 inhibitory activity has already been met, we propose to run a secondary, fragment-based screen to refine the existing lead compounds and prioritize a small number for cell-based validation in Milestone 2. The success in Milestone 1 was based on computational modeling, HTS of 200,000 compounds and Fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD).
For Milestone 2, we have successfully established POC analysis tools for validation of the ability of compounds to bind the BCL6 lateral groove and already produced 300 mg of BCL6-BTB domain protein needed for biochemical binding assays. Progress in Milestone 2 is based on surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) assays. In the coming months, we will use crystallographic fragment screening using a subset of our fragment library in addition to SPR and NMR, since crystallographic fragment screens have been shown to yield complimentary hits. For Milestone 3, we have now set up a reliable method to measure disease-modifying activity of BCL6-inhibitory compounds based on a newly generated knockin BCL6 reporter mouse model, in which transcriptional activation of the endogenous BCL6 promoter drives expression of mCherry. This addresses a main caveat of these measurements was that they were strongly influenced by the copy number of lentivector integrations. The BCL6fl/+-mCherry knockin BCL6 reporter system will provide a stable platform to study BCL6-expressing leukemia cells and effects of BCL6 small molecule inhibitors on survival and proliferation on BCL6-dependent leukemia cell populations. This will be a key requirement to measure disease-modifying activity of inhibitory compounds in large-scale assays in Milestone 3. Other requirements (e.g. leukemia xenografts) are already in place.