A potential inhibitor of MDM2 by restoring the native conformation of the p53 α-helical peptide on gold nanoparticles

Many efforts have been made to develop inhibitors of MDM2 as potential drugs for cancer therapy. In this work, we use our previous developed conformational engineering technique to stabilize the binding conformation of the p53 transcription activation domain (TAD) peptide on gold NPs (AuNPs), and create an AuNP-based anti-MDM2 artificial antibody, denoted as Goldbody, that specifically binds MDM2. Though the free TAD peptide is unstructured, circular dichroism spectra confirm that its α-helical conformation in the original p53 protein is restored on the anti-MDM2 Goldbody, and surface plasmon resonance (SPR) experiments confirm that there is strong specific interaction between the anti-MDM2 Goldbody and MDM2, demonstrating the anti-MDM2 Goldbody as a potential inhibitor of MDM2. This work demonstrates that the conformational engineering technique is not limited to the antigen-antibody systems, but can also be applied more widely in other protein-protein interfaces to create more and more artificial proteins for various biomedical applications.