Rational engineering of an antimalarial peptide with enhanced proteolytic stability and preserved parasite invasion inhibitory activity

Abstract

We describe rational chemical engineering to enhance the proteolytic stability of a chimeric peptide using a combination of unique strategies that involve the incorporation of a series of D-amino acids into the parent L-peptide sequence and restricting the conformational freedom of the peptide by covalent stitching. We hypothesize that replacing a stretch of sequence of an unstructured peptide motif with D-amino acids would increase its proteolytic stability without significantly affecting its affinity to the target protein. Also, considering the C_β–C_β distances, replacing an appropriate pair of residues with cysteine to form an additional disulfide bond in the molecule would provide additional stability to the engineered peptide. To verify this hypothesis, we have implemented these strategies to a previously reported peptidic inhibitor RR, against P. falciparum invasion into red blood cells (RBCs) and designed two novel heterochiral chimeric peptides, RR-I and RR-II. We have demonstrated that these peptides exhibit remarkable inhibitory activity with dramatically enhanced proteolytic stability. Finally, we have designed a cyclic analog, RR-III, to enhance the stability of the peptide against endopeptidases. The RR-III peptide exhibits the same inhibitory activity as RR-II while demonstrating impressive resistance to enzymatic degradation and prolonged stability in human plasma. These developments hold promise for a new generation of peptide-based therapeutics, showcasing the potential of residue selection for tailored modifications, as demonstrated in this work.