Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, University of Toronto, Toronto M5S 3E1, Canada.
Department of Biochemistry, University of Toronto, Toronto M5S 1A8, Canada.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2018 Feb 13;115(7):1505-1510. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1711837115. Epub 2018 Jan 29.
Biologics are a rapidly growing class of therapeutics with many advantages over traditional small molecule drugs. A major obstacle to their development is that proteins and peptides are easily destroyed by proteases and, thus, typically have prohibitively short half-lives in human gut, plasma, and cells. One of the most effective ways to prevent degradation is to engineer analogs from dextrorotary (D)-amino acids, with up to 10-fold improvements in potency reported. We here propose a general peptide-engineering platform that overcomes limitations of previous methods. By creating a mirror image of every structure in the Protein Data Bank (PDB), we generate a database of ∼2.8 million D-peptides. To obtain a D-analog of a given peptide, we search the (D)-PDB for similar configurations of its critical-"hotspot"-residues. As a proof of concept, we apply our method to two peptides that are Food and Drug Administration approved as therapeutics for diabetes and osteoporosis, respectively. We obtain D-analogs that activate the GLP1 and PTH1 receptors with the same efficacy as their natural counterparts and show greatly increased half-life.
生物制剂是一类快速发展的治疗药物,相对于传统的小分子药物具有许多优势。其发展的主要障碍是蛋白质和肽很容易被蛋白酶破坏,因此在人类肠道、血浆和细胞中通常具有极短的半衰期。防止降解的最有效方法之一是用右旋(D)-氨基酸工程类似物,据报道其效力提高了 10 倍。我们在这里提出了一个通用的肽工程平台,克服了以前方法的局限性。通过创建蛋白质数据库(PDB)中每个结构的镜像,我们生成了一个约 280 万个 D-肽的数据库。为了获得给定肽的 D-类似物,我们在(D)-PDB 中搜索其关键“热点”残基的类似构象。作为概念验证,我们将我们的方法应用于两种分别被美国食品和药物管理局批准为糖尿病和骨质疏松症治疗药物的肽。我们得到的 D-类似物激活 GLP1 和 PTH1 受体的功效与天然对应物相同,并显示出大大延长的半衰期。