Inhibiting viral proteases: Challenges and opportunities

Inhibitor design against viral targets must take into account the peculiar characteristics of viral biology—in particular, the plasticity of their replicative machinery. This includes maturational cleavage of the polyprotein, which is mediated by virally encoded proteases. Designing against a movable target is particularly challenging, but at the same time it offers new opportunities. Here we describe our experience with the NS3/4A (NS: nonstructural) serine protease of human hepatitis C virus (HCV). By extensive use of combinatorial peptide libraries, various inhibitor types were generated, including product inhibitors, serine traps, P–P′ inhibitors, and prime side inhibitors. The latter represent a first case for a serine protease. A key finding, derived from structural studies utilizing these inhibitors, was that NS3 is an induced‐fit protease, requiring both the NS4A cofactor protein and the substrate to fully activate its catalytic machinery. In the absence of cofactor and/or substrate, NS3 exists in solution as a large conformational ensemble, which can be matched by a correspondingly large set of peptide inhibitors, each one stabilizing a given conformer. In the perspective of inhibiting viral proteases in general, we suggest that combinatorial ligand ensembles may be a powerful tool, to contrast the adaptive potential of the viral quasispecies. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Biopolymers (Pept Sci) 66: 101–114, 2002