Discovery of Next-Generation Tropomyosin Receptor Kinase Inhibitors for Combating Multiple Resistance Associated with Protein Mutation

Tropomyosin receptor kinase (TRK) inhibition is an effective therapeutic approach for treatment of a variety of cancers. Despite the use of first-generation TRK inhibitor (TRKI) larotrectinib (1) resulting in significant therapeutic response in patients, acquired resistance develops invariably. The emergence of secondary mutations occurring at the solvent-front, xDFG, and gatekeeper regions of TRK represents a common mechanism for acquired resistance. However, xDFG mutations remain insensitive to second-generation macrocyclic TRKIs selitrectinib (3) and repotrectinib (4) designed to overcome the resistance mediated by solvent-front and gatekeeper mutations. Here, we report the structure-based drug design and discovery of a next-generation TRKI. The structure–activity relationship studies culminated in the identification of a promising drug candidate 8 that showed excellent in vitro potency on a panel of TRK mutants, especially TRKAG667C in the xDFG motif, and improved in vivo efficacy than 1 and 3 in TRK wild-type and mutant fusion-driven tumor xenograft models, respectively.