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Abstract
The mosquito-borne West Nile virus (WNV) causes a wide range of symptoms ranging from fever to the often fatal viral encephalitis. To date, no vaccine or drug therapy is available. The trypsin-like WNV NS2B-NS3 protease is deemed a plausible drug target and was shown to be inhibited by bovine pancreatic trypsin inhibitor (BPTI), a 58-residue protein isolated from bovine lung. Herein, we report a protein truncation study that resulted in a novel 14-residue cyclic peptide with equipotent inhibitory activity to native BPTI. We believe our truncation strategy can be further applied in the development of peptide-based inhibitors targeting trypsin-like proteases.
Acknowledgement
We thank A*STAR Biomedical Research Council for providing financial support.
Declaration of interest
The authors of this paper declare no conflicts of interest.
Additional note
Peptide structures #1 to 19 described in this manuscript have been submitted for patent filing (UK Patent Application No. 1513019.8) on 25 July 2015.
Supplementary material available online.