Back

Discovery of orally bioavailable Zika and West Nile Virus antiviral compounds targeting the NS2B-NS3 protease

Kenton, N. T.; Barr, H.; Cherepakha, A.; Coelmont, L.; Collard, C.; Cousins, D.; Davies, G. H. M.; Degtyarenko, O.; Dirksen, A.; Elbrecht, D.; Fearon, D.; Gayvert, J.; Griffen, E.; Jochmans, D.; Kaptein, S.; Kliatskiy, P.; Kochetkov, A.; Kordubailo, M.; Lahav, N.; London, N.; Maas, E.; Marples, P.; Nady, N.; Neyts, J.; Nguyen, L.; Ni, X.; Ogorodnik, Y.; Robinson, M. C.; Simpson, C. T.; Tarabara, I.; Tkachenko, A.; von Delft, A.; von Delft, F.; Yakymenko, O.; Lee, A. A.

2025-06-20 microbiology
10.1101/2025.06.19.660642 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Flaviviruses are a class of pathogenic viruses with pandemic potential which are typically transmitted via infected arthropods. In particular, Zika virus is sexually transmissible and causes congenital malformations if infection occurs during pregnancy. Although over 1.5 million people were infected during the 2015-2016 Zika outbreak, to date, there are no clinical-stage vaccines or antivirals. Herein, we report the discovery of potent inhibitors of the Zika virus NS2B-NS3 protease that also show activity against the West Nile virus NS2B-NS3 protease. Starting from a crystallographic fragment screen, we employed a pharmacophore approach coupled with high-throughput library chemistry to elaborate fragments in the active site. Potent, metabolically stable, non-covalent, non-peptidomimetic inhibitors were identified with cellular antiviral activity, with one example demonstrating excellent murine bioavailability.

Matching journals

The top 9 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.