Development of chemokine network inhibitors using combinatorial saturation mutagenesis

Development of chemokine network inhibitors using combinatorial saturation mutagenesis

Blog Article

Abstract Targeting chemokine-driven inflammation has been elusive due to redundant pathways constituting chemokine-immune cell networks.Tick evasins overcome redundant pathways by broadly targeting either CC or CXC-chemokine classes.Recently identified evasin-derived vibrating table for chocolate peptides inhibiting both chemokine classes provide a starting point for developing agents with enhanced potency and breadth of action.Structure-guided and affinity maturation approaches to achieve this are unsuitable when multiple targets are concerned.

Here we develop a combinatorial saturation mutagenesis optimisation strategy (CoSMOS).This identifies a combinatorially mutated evasin-derived peptide with significantly enhanced pIC50 against three different inflammatory disease chemokine pools.Using AlphaFold 3 to model peptide - chemokine interactions, we show that the combinatorially mutated peptide has increased total and hydrophobic inter-chain bonding via tryptophan residues and is predicted to sterically hinder chemokine interactions required for immune cell migration.We suggest that CoSMOS-generated promiscuous binding activities could target disease puffy spa headband networks where structurally related proteins drive redundant signalling pathways.