Structure-thermodynamics-relationships of hepatitis C viral NS3 protease inhibitors

Hepatitis C: The Story of a Long Journey through First, Second, and Third Generation NS3/4A Peptidomimetic Inhibitors. What Did We Learn?

Hepatitis C viral (HCV) infection is the leading cause of liver failure and still represents a global health burden. Over the past decade, great advancements made HCV curable, and sustained viral remission significantly improved to more than 98%. Historical treatment with pegylated interferon alpha and ribavirin has been displaced by combinations of direct-acting antivirals. These regimens include drugs targeting different stages of the HCV life cycle. However, the emergence of viral resistance remains a big concern. The design of peptidomimetic inhibitors (PIs) able to fit and fill the conserved substrate envelope region within the active site helped avoid contact with the vulnerable sites of the most common resistance-associated substitutions Arg155, Ala156, and Asp168. Herein, we give an overview of HCV NS3 PIs discovered during the past decade, and we deeply discuss the rationale behind the structural optimization efforts essential to achieve pangenotypic activity.

Comment on "Physicochemical stimuli as tuning parameters to modulate the structure and stability of nanostructured lipid carriers and release kinetics of encapsulated antileprosy drugs" by R. Kanwar, M. Gradzielski, S. Prevost, G. Kaur, M. S. Appavou and S. K. Mehta, J. Mater. Chem. B, 2019, , 6539

In a recent article [R. Kanwar et al., J. Mater. Chem. B, 2019, 7(42), 6539-6555], the authors characterized the interactions between drug-loaded nanostructured lipid carriers and bovine serum albumin using thermodynamics. They found that the interactions are spontaneous and driven by entropy. In this present paper, we report our analysis of these results in terms of equilibrium thermodynamics to show that the binding reactions exhibit enthalpy-entropy compensation. Our findings may prove useful for designing nanostructured lipid carriers.