Skip to main content

New Drug Approvals - Pt. IV - Tolvaptan (Samsca)

Latest through the gates is Tolvaptan (trade name Samsca), approved on May 21st 2009. Tolvaptan is a first-in-class oral vasopressin receptor antagonist used for the treatment of hyponatremia (low plasma sodium levels). Tolvaptan (previously known as the research code OPC-41,061) is selective for the Vasopressin V2 receptor isoform (reportedly 29 fold selective over the V1a receptor isoform. There are a number of -vaptans (the USAN stem for vasopressin antagonists) of varying selectivity profiles in clinical trials (including Conivaptan, Relcovaptan, SSR-149,415, Lixivaptan, Mozavaptan, and Satavaptan) for a variety of differing indications; but Tolvaptan is the first to be approved in the US.

Tolvaptan has a boxed warning (colloquially known as a 'black box').

Tolvaptan is a racemic small molecule drug (Molecular Weight of 448.9 g.mol-1) and is a lipophilic drug, is essentially insoluble in water, and has fair oral absorption (>40% bioavailable). Tolvaptan hsa a plasma half-life of around 12 hours, a volume of distribution of 3L/kg, and has high plasma protein binding at 99%. Tolvaptan is extensively metabolised by 3A4, and therefore has many concommitent interactions with 3A4 substrates, inhibitors and inducers. Reportedly, Tolvaptan metabolites show no appreciable pharmacology against the vasopressin receptors. Interestingly, Tolvaptan is a racemic drug, with the two enantiomers showing differing PK/PD. Typical daily dosing is 30mg (or ~67µmol), or 60mg if insufficient efficacy is observed. The full prescribing information is here.

The structure (±)-4'-[(7-chloro-2,3,4,5-tetrahydro-5-hydroxy-1H-1-benzazepin-1-yl) carbony1]- o-tolu-m-toluidide. The molecule is rigid, with very few freely rotatable bonds, and comparatively planar (due to the presence of sp2 hybridized atoms adjacent to the core phenyl ring). The racemic stereocenter is at the hydroxyl on the benzazepine (a benzazepine is a seven-membered nitrogen containing heterocycle (an azepine) fused to benzene ring). The neutral, largely lipophilic and aromatic nature of Tolvaptan is consistent with the reported 3A4 avidity. Finally, another feature of note is the presence of an aniline in the molecule (an aniline is an aromatic amine, here in Tolvaptan it is masked as an amide); anilines have a reputation for being associated with unwanted toxicities with drugs, although this is by no-way a hard and fast rule!

Tolvaptan canonical SMILES: CC1=CC=CC=C1C(=O)NC2=CC(=C(C=C2)C(=O)N3CCCC(C4=C3C=CC(=C4)Cl)O)C Tolvaptan InChI: InChI=1S/C26H25ClN2O3/c1-16-6-3-4-7-20(16)25(31)28-19-10-11-21(17(2)14- 19)26(32)29-13-5-8-24(30)22-15-18(27)9-12-23(22)29/h3-4,6-7,9-12,14-15, 24,30H,5,8,13H2,1-2H3,(H,28,31) Tolvaptan InChIKey: GYHCTFXIZSNGJT-UHFFFAOYSA-N Tolvaptan CAS registry: 150683-30-0 Tolvaptan Chemdraw: Tolvaptan.cdx

The license holder for Tolvaptan is Otsuka Pharmaceuticals and the product website is www.samsca.com

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

New SureChEMBL announcement

(Generated with DALL-E 3 ∙ 30 October 2023 at 1:48 pm) We have some very exciting news to report: the new SureChEMBL is now available! Hooray! What is SureChEMBL, you may ask. Good question! In our portfolio of chemical biology services, alongside our established database of bioactivity data for drug-like molecules ChEMBL , our dictionary of annotated small molecule entities ChEBI , and our compound cross-referencing system UniChem , we also deliver a database of annotated patents! Almost 10 years ago , EMBL-EBI acquired the SureChem system of chemically annotated patents and made this freely accessible in the public domain as SureChEMBL. Since then, our team has continued to maintain and deliver SureChEMBL. However, this has become increasingly challenging due to the complexities of the underlying codebase. We were awarded a Wellcome Trust grant in 2021 to completely overhaul SureChEMBL, with a new UI, backend infrastructure, and new f

A python client for accessing ChEMBL web services

Motivation The CheMBL Web Services provide simple reliable programmatic access to the data stored in ChEMBL database. RESTful API approaches are quite easy to master in most languages but still require writing a few lines of code. Additionally, it can be a challenging task to write a nontrivial application using REST without any examples. These factors were the motivation for us to write a small client library for accessing web services from Python. Why Python? We choose this language because Python has become extremely popular (and still growing in use) in scientific applications; there are several Open Source chemical toolkits available in this language, and so the wealth of ChEMBL resources and functionality of those toolkits can be easily combined. Moreover, Python is a very web-friendly language and we wanted to show how easy complex resource acquisition can be expressed in Python. Reinventing the wheel? There are already some libraries providing access to ChEMBL d

LSH-based similarity search in MongoDB is faster than postgres cartridge.

TL;DR: In his excellent blog post , Matt Swain described the implementation of compound similarity searches in MongoDB . Unfortunately, Matt's approach had suboptimal ( polynomial ) time complexity with respect to decreasing similarity thresholds, which renders unsuitable for production environments. In this article, we improve on the method by enhancing it with Locality Sensitive Hashing algorithm, which significantly reduces query time and outperforms RDKit PostgreSQL cartridge . myChEMBL 21 - NoSQL edition    Given that NoSQL technologies applied to computational chemistry and cheminformatics are gaining traction and popularity, we decided to include a taster in future myChEMBL releases. Two especially appealing technologies are Neo4j and MongoDB . The former is a graph database and the latter is a BSON document storage. We would like to provide IPython notebook -based tutorials explaining how to use this software to deal with common cheminformatics p

Multi-task neural network on ChEMBL with PyTorch 1.0 and RDKit

  Update: KNIME protocol with the model available thanks to Greg Landrum. Update: New code to train the model and ONNX exported trained models available in github . The use and application of multi-task neural networks is growing rapidly in cheminformatics and drug discovery. Examples can be found in the following publications: - Deep Learning as an Opportunity in VirtualScreening - Massively Multitask Networks for Drug Discovery - Beyond the hype: deep neural networks outperform established methods using a ChEMBL bioactivity benchmark set But what is a multi-task neural network? In short, it's a kind of neural network architecture that can optimise multiple classification/regression problems at the same time while taking advantage of their shared description. This blogpost gives a great overview of their architecture. All networks in references above implement the hard parameter sharing approach. So, having a set of activities relating targets and molecules we can tra

Using ChEMBL activity comments

We’re sometimes asked what the ‘activity_comments’ in the ChEMBL database mean. In this Blog post, we’ll use aspirin as an example to explain some of the more common activity comments. First, let’s review the bioactivity data included in ChEMBL. We extract bioactivity data directly from   seven core medicinal chemistry journals . Some common activity types, such as IC50s, are standardised  to allow broad comparisons across assays; the standardised data can be found in the  standard_value ,  standard_relation  and  standard_units  fields. Original data is retained in the database downloads in the  value ,  relation  and  units  fields. However, we extract all data from a publication including non-numerical bioactivity and ADME data. In these cases, the activity comments may be populated during the ChEMBL extraction-curation process  in order to capture the author's  overall  conclusions . Similarly, for deposited datasets and subsets of other databases (e.g. DrugMatrix, PubChem), th