A high-quality homology model for the human dopamine transporter validated for drug design purposes.

2018

The human dopamine transporter (hDAT) plays many vital functions within the central nervous system and is thus targeted by many pharmaceutical agents. Dopamine-related therapies are in current development for individuals with dopamine-related disorders including depression, Parkinson's disease, and psychostimulant addictions such as cocaine abuse. Yet, most efforts to develop new dopamine therapies are within costly structure-activity relationship studies. Through structure-based drug design techniques, the binding site of hDAT can be utilized to develop novel selective and potent dopamine therapies at reduced costs. However, no structural models of hDAT specifically validated for rational …