2010 New Drug Approval - Pt. X - Ulipristal Acetate (Ella)

ATC code: G03AD02

The most recent approval by FDA is Ulipristal Acetate, approved on August 13th 2010 under the trade name Ella. Ulipristal Acetate (previously known by the research code CDB-2914 or VA-2914) is a progesterone agonist/antagonist emergency contraceptive, indicated for prevention of pregnancy following unprotected intercourse or known or suspected contraceptive failure.
This drug is a selective progesterone receptor modulator (SPRM) with antagonist and partial agonist effects (a progesterone agonist/antagonist) at the progesterone receptor (PR, NR3C3) (Uniprot code: P06401). The Progesterone Receptor is a member of a very significant family of proteins for drug discovery, the Nuclear Receptors, a family of around 50 genes which are transcription factors, the transcription by NRs is usually ligand regulated. Ulipristal Acetate prevents progesterone, the endogenous ligand, from occupying its receptor. Ulpristal Acetate binds in the ligand binding domain (LBD) of PR (PFAM: PF00104).

There are several structures known of PR complexed with ligands, a representative one is (PDB: 3D90).

Ulipristal Acetate will compete with Levonorgestrel, another progestagen available on the market, which is approved for use up to three days post-intercourse as opposed to five days in the case of Ulipristal Acetate.
Ulipristal Acetate is a small-molecule, natural product derived drug (Molecular Weight 475.6 g.mol-1), Rule-of-Five compliant and it is delivered as a tablet. Ulispristal Acetate is highly bound to plasma proteins (>94%), including high density lipoprotein, alpha-1-acid glycoprotein, and albumin. It is metabolized to mono- and di-demethylated metabolites, mostly by CYP3A4; the mono-demethylated metabolite pharmacologically active. Ulpristal Acetate shows high affinity for the related nuclear receptor - glucocorticoid receptor (GR, NR3C1). The terminal half-life of Ulipristal Acetate is ca. 32 hours. The recommended dosage is one tablet (30 mg) taken orally, with or without food, as soon as possible, within 120 hours (five days) after unprotected intercourse or a known or suspected contraceptive failure.
The full prescribing information can be found here.

The structure 17alpha-acetoxy-11beta-(4-N,N-dimethylaminophenyl)-19-norpregna-4,9-diene-3,20-dione is a synthetic progestagen and is thus very similar to progesterone. Like other steroid hormones of this class, Ulipristal Acetate is characterized by its basic 21-carbon skeleton, i.e., four interconnected cyclic hydrocarbons with two methyl branches and a ketone. In this particular case, one of the methyl groups is replaced by a substituted aromatic amine.

NAME="Ulipristal Acetate"
TRADEMARK_NAME="Ella"
ATC_code= NA
SMILES="CC(=O)C1(CCC2C1(CC(C3=C4CCC(=O)C=C4CCC23)C5=CC=C
(C=C5)N(C)C)C)OC(=O)C"
InChI="InChI=1S/C30H37NO4/c1-18(32)30(35-19(2)33)15-14-27
-25-12-8-21-16-23(34)11-13-24(21)28(25)26(17-29(27,30)3)
20-6-9-22(10-7-20)31(4)5/h6-7,9-10,16,25-27H,8,11-15,17H2,
1-5H3/t25-,26+,27-,29-,30-/m0/s1"
ChemDraw=Ulipristal_Acetate.cdx

The license holder is Laboratoire HRA Pharma.

Comments

Improvements in SureChEMBL's chemistry search and adoption of RDKit

Dear SureChEMBL users, If you frequently rely on our "chemistry search" feature, today brings great news! We’ve recently implemented a major update that makes your search experience faster than ever. What's New? Last week, we upgraded our structure search engine by aligning it with the core code base used in ChEMBL . This update allows SureChEMBL to leverage our FPSim2 Python package , returning results in approximately one second. The similarity search relies on 256-bit RDKit -calculated ECFP4 fingerprints, and a single instance requires approximately 1 GB of RAM to run. SureChEMBL’s FPSim2 file is not currently available for download, but we are considering generating it periodicaly and have created it once for you to try in Google Colab ! For substructure searches, we now also use an RDKit -based solution via SubstructLibrary , which returns results several times faster than our previous implementation. Additionally, structure search results are now sorted by

Improved querying for SureChEMBL

Dear SureChEMBL users, Earlier this year we ran a survey to identify what you, the users, would like to see next in SureChEMBL. Thank you for offering your feedback! This gave us the opportunity to have some interesting discussions both internally and externally. While we can't publicly reveal precisely our plans for the coming months (everything will be delivered at the right time), we can at least say that improving the compound structure extraction quality is a priority. Unfortunately, the change won't happen overnight as reprocessing 167 millions patents takes a while. However, the good news is that the new generation of optical chemical structure recognition shows good performance, even for patent images! We hope we can share our results with you soon. So in the meantime, what are we doing? You may have noticed a few changes on the SureChEMBL main page. No more "Beta" flag since we consider the system to be stable enough (it does not mean that you will never

ChEMBL brings drug bioactivity data to the Protein Data Bank in Europe

In the quest to develop new drugs, understanding the 3D structure of molecules is crucial. Resources like the Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe) and the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) provide these 3D blueprints for many biological molecules. However, researchers also need to know how these molecules interact with their biological target – their bioactivity. ChEMBL is a treasure trove of bioactivity data for countless drug-like molecules. It tells us how strongly a molecule binds to a target, how it affects a biological process, and even how it might be metabolized. But here's the catch: while ChEMBL provides extensive information on a molecule's activity and cross references to other data sources, it doesn't always tell us if a 3D structure is available for a specific drug-target complex. This can be a roadblock for researchers who need that structural information to design effective drugs. Therefore, connecting ChEMBL data with resources like PDBe and CSD is essen

ChEMBL 34 is out!

We are delighted to announce the release of ChEMBL 34, which includes a full update to drug and clinical candidate drug data. This version of the database, prepared on 28/03/2024 contains: 2,431,025 compounds (of which 2,409,270 have mol files) 3,106,257 compound records (non-unique compounds) 20,772,701 activities 1,644,390 assays 15,598 targets 89,892 documents Data can be downloaded from the ChEMBL FTP site: https://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/chembl/ChEMBLdb/releases/chembl_34/ Please see ChEMBL_34 release notes for full details of all changes in this release: https://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/chembl/ChEMBLdb/releases/chembl_34/chembl_34_release_notes.txt New Data Sources European Medicines Agency (src_id = 66): European Medicines Agency's data correspond to EMA drugs prior to 20 January 2023 (excluding vaccines). 71 out of the 882 newly added EMA drugs are only authorised by EMA, rather than from other regulatory bodies e.g.

In search of the perfect assay description

Credit: Science biotech, CC BY-SA 4.0 Assays des cribe the experimental set-up when testing the activity of drug-like compounds against biological targets; they provide useful context for researchers interested in drug-target relationships. Ver sion 33 of ChEMBL contains 1.6 million diverse assays spanning ADMET, physicochemical, binding, functional and toxicity experiments. A set of well-defined and structured assay descriptions would be valuable for the drug discovery community, particularly for text mining and NLP projects. These would also support ChEMBL's ongoing efforts towards an in vitro assay classification. This Blog post will consider the features of the 'perfect' assay description and provide a guide for depositors on the submission of high quality data. ChEMBL's assays are typically structured with the overall aim, target, and method . The ideal assay description is succinct but contains all the necessary information for easy interpretation by database u

The ChEMBL-og

Search This Blog