Characterization of AG10, a potent stabilizer of transthyretin, and its application in enhancing in vivo half-life of therapeutic peptides

• Main Author: Penchala, Sravan C.
• Format: Others
• Published: Scholarly Commons 2016
• Subjects: Pharmacology; Biochemistry; Pharmacy sciences; Pure sciences; Health and environmental sciences; Chemical synthesis; Drug delivery; Peptides; Pharmacokinetics; Chemicals and Drugs; Chemistry; Medical Pharmacology; Medicinal-Pharmaceutical Chemistry; Medicine and Health Sciences; Pharmaceutical Preparations; Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences; Physical Sciences and Mathematics
• Online Access: https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/uop_etds/130; https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1129&context=uop_etds

The misassembly of soluble proteins into toxic aggregates, including amyloid fibrils, underlies a large number of human degenerative diseases. Cardiac amyloidoses, which are most commonly caused by aggregation of Immunoglobulin (Ig) light chains or transthyretin (TTR) in the cardiac interstitium and conducting system, represent an important and often underdiagnosed cause of heart failure. Two types of TTR-associated amyloid cardiomyopathies are clinically important. The Val122Ile (V122I) mutation, which alters the kinetic stability of TTR and affects 3% to 4% of African Americans, can lead to development of familial amyloid cardiomyopathy. In addition, aggregation of WT TTR in individuals older than age 65 years causes senile systemic amyloidosis. TTR-mediated amyloid cardiomyopathies are chronic and progressive conditions that lead to arrhythmias, biventricular heart failure, and death. As no Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs are currently available for treatment of these diseases, the development of therapeutic agents that prevent TTR-mediated cardiotoxicity is desired. Here, we report the characterization of AG10 , a potent and selective kinetic stabilizer of TTR. AG10 prevents dissociation of V122I-TTR in serum samples obtained from patients with familial amyloid cardiomyopathy. In contrast to other TTR stabilizers currently in clinical trials, AG10 stabilizes V122I- and WT-TTR equally well and also exceeds their efficacy to stabilize WT and mutant TTR in whole serum. Crystallographic studies of AG10 bound to V122I-TTR give valuable insights into how AG10 achieves such effective kinetic stabilization of TTR, which will also aid in designing better TTR stabilizers. The oral bioavailability of AG10 , combined with additional desirable drug-like features, makes it a very promising candidate to treat TTR amyloid cardiomyopathy. The second part of the thesis discusses harnessing TTR as a platform to enhance in vivo half-life of therapeutic peptides. The tremendous therapeutic potential of peptides has not yet been realized, mainly owing to their short in vivo half-life. Although conjugation to macromolecules has been a mainstay approach for enhancing protein half-life, the steric hindrance of macromolecules often harms the binding of peptides to target receptors, compromising the in vivo efficacy. Here we report a new strategy for enhancing the in vivo half-life of a model peptide Gonadotropin Releasing Hormone (GnRH) and its analog GnRH-A without compromising their potency. Apart from GnRH, we have used other peptides to study their proteolytic stability in vitro . Our approach involves endowing peptides with a small molecule that binds reversibly to the serum protein transthyretin. Although there are a few molecules that bind albumin reversibly, we are unaware of designed small molecules that reversibly bind other serum proteins and are used for half-life extension in vivo . We show here that our strategy was effective in enhancing the half-life of an agonist for GnRH receptor while maintaining its binding affinity, which was translated into superior in vivo efficacy.