Backbone Modified Peptide-nucleic Acids as Antiviral Agents Against Hepatitis C

描述（由申请人提供）：全球有超过2亿人感染丙型肝炎病毒（HCV），这是一个重大的健康问题。目前治疗丙型肝炎病毒感染的方法是使用重组干扰素和利巴韦林，只有不到50%的患者有效，慢性丙型肝炎病毒感染的患者可能会出现严重的健康问题，包括肝硬化和肝细胞癌。因此，迫切需要开发新的治疗策略。HCV的基因组由正链RNA编码，它包含一个开放的阅读框，两侧是5‘和3’非翻译区（utr）。尽管病毒的突变率很高，但HCV RNA编码区及其5'-和3'- utr包含进化保守序列，这些序列被认为参与了彼此之间复杂的远程相互作用。尽管这些相互作用的分子机制尚不完全清楚，但遗传数据表明它们在病毒复制和转译中起着至关重要的作用。因此，考虑到这些相互作用在HCV生命周期中的重要作用，抑制这些涉及所有HCV基因型中100%保护区域的相互作用是一种有吸引力的抗病毒策略，这是该研究的长期目标

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): With more than 200 million people infected, the Hepatitis C virus (HCV) poses a major health problem worldwide. The current therapy to treat HCV infections, which uses recombinant alpha interferon and ribavirin, is efficient only in less than 50% of the patients and chronically HCV infected patients can develop serious health problems which include liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. Thus, there is an urgent need for the development of new therapeutic strategies. HCV has its genome encoded by a positive-strand RNA, which contains an open reading frame flanked by 5'- and 3'-untranslated regions (UTRs). Despite the high mutational rate of the virus, the HCV RNA coding region, as well as its 5'- and 3'-UTRs contain evolutionary conserved sequences proposed to be involved in an intricate array of long-range interactions with each other. Although the molecular mechanisms of these interactions are not all clear, genetic data indicates that they play vital roles in the virus replication and translation. Thus, the inhibition of these interactions which involve regions of 100% conservancy among all HCV genotypes, is an attractive antiviral strategy, given their essential roles in the HCV life cycle, and this is the long term goal of this project, which has the following specific aims: Specific aim 1. Design and synthesis of peptide-nucleic acids which target conserved regions of the HCV genomic RNA essential for the viral replication and translation. Specific aim 2. Analyze the ability of the designed PNAs to disrupt the long-range interactions between regions of highly conservancy within the HCV RNA genome, inhibiting HCV replication and translation. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The significance of the proposed research is evident, as the peptide nucleic acid (PNA) inhibitors proposed to be synthesized and analyzed in these studies, target regions of 100% conservancy within the HCV genome. These ?-modified PNAs aim to disrupt essential long- range interactions between these regions, interactions whose biological significance for the viral life cycle has been established by genetic data. Thus, these studies have the potential to identify efficient inhibitors for HCV replication and translation, an imperatve task, considering the major health problem posed worldwide by the HCV infection, whose incidence is over 200 million people.