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2715: LRH-1 Round 1

Closed since about 2 months ago

Intermediate Overall Small Molecule Design

Summary


Created
January 16, 2026
Expires
Max points
100
Description

LRH-1 (liver receptor homologue-1) is a nuclear receptor that helps control how the body balances fat and sugar metabolism by turning specific genes on and off. Because of this central role, tuning LRH-1 activity has shown therapeutic promise: synthetic compounds that modulate LRH-1 can reduce symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease and diabetes in mouse models. LRH-1 is also implicated in multiple cancers, making it an important, but notoriously difficult, drug target.

Your creativity could help “drug the undruggable.” Build from what’s known, explore bold new possibilities, and design binders that could help become the next generation of LRH-1 therapeutics! For more information check out the blog post.

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Comments


Sciren Staff Lv 1

Objectives

Maximum bonus: +9000

Compound Library (max +2000)
Gives a bonus if your current compound is in the library. This uses a local cached version of the Compound Library search results to determine if the compound is in the library. If you manually create a compound that happens to be in the library (or if you load a shared solution with an on-library compound), you may need to submit the compound to the compound library search and wait to get the results back before the objective can properly recognize that the compound is in the library. (If the objective is not updating, try wiggling the structure. See this forum post for more discussion.)

Torsion Quality (max +1000)
Keeps bond rotations in a good range. Using Wiggle or Tweak Ligand can fix bad torsions. (Show highlights torsions to be rotated.)

Number of Rotatable Bonds (max +1000)
Intended to keep the ligand from getting too big and floppy. You can reduce rotatable bonds by deleting groups or forming rings. (Show highlights rotatable bonds.)

Ligand TPSA (max +1000)
Topological Polar Surface Area - Keeps the polar surface area (including buried polar surface) low. To improve, try removing oxygens and nitrogens. (Show highlights atoms contributing to higher TPSA.)

Ligand cLogP (max +1000)
A measure of polarity - Keeps the molecule from getting too hydrophobic. To improve, try adding polar oxygens and nitrogens. (Show highlights atoms contributing to higher cLogP.)

Bad Groups (max +1000)
Gives a bonus for avoiding groups that interfere with assays, which are far from the compounds in the library, or which otherwise have issues. (Show highlights groups at issue.)

Molecular Weight (max +1000)
Keeps the ligand within a reasonable size limit.

Synthetic Accessibility (max +1000)
Keeps the ligand from going too far from the compounds in the library. (Show highlights parts of the molecule at issue.)

Floddi Lv 1

cis-Bicyclo(3.3.0)oct-2-ene will work really good in this puzzle.
It's also mentioned in the literatur of the blog post (https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jmedchem.1c01663)

I can highly recommend using this structure or Bicyclooctane because it isn't as planar as aromatic compounds therefore it's easier to expand the structure inside the pocket.

(The Bicyclooctane is already part of the starting structure.)

Natural ligands (which can contain long chained fatty acids) are unsuitable because of the missing bonus (-rot. bonds and also bad groups). Therefore a whole group of molecules which are prone to (probably) work in this enviroment will be evicted because of the scoring system.
This also affects the starting molecule (bonus reduction = -11440(!) points) which scores better if you're removing/changing (forming cycles) the whole aliphatic part.