A Perspective on the Kinetics of Covalent and Irreversible Inhibition

The clinical and commercial success of covalent drugs has prompted a renewed and more deliberate pursuit of covalent and irreversible mechanisms within drug discovery. A covalent mechanism can produce potent inhibition in a biochemical, cellular, or in vivo setting. In many cases, teams choose to focus on the consequences of the covalent event, defined by an IC50 value. In a biochemical assay, the IC50 may simply reflect the target protein concentration in the assay. What has received less attention is the importance of the rate of covalent modification, defined by kinact/KI. The kinact/KI is a rate constant describing the efficiency of covalent bond formation resulting from the potency (KI) of the first reversible binding event and the maximum potential rate (kinact) of inactivation. In this perspective, it is proposed that the kinact/KI should be employed as a critical parameter to identify covalent inhibitors, interpret structure-activity relationships (SARs), translate activity from biochemical assays to the cell, and more accurately define selectivity. It is also proposed that a physiologically relevant kinact/KI and an (unbound) AUC generated from a pharmacokinetic profile reflecting direct exposure of the inhibitor to the target protein are two critical determinants of in vivo covalent occupancy. A simple equation is presented to define this relationship and improve the interpretation of covalent and irreversible kinetics.