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New drug targets may lead to effective Ebola treatments

November 13th, 2014

There are no approved treatments or preventatives against Ebola virus disease, but investigators have now designed peptides that mimic the virus' N-trimer, a highly conserved region of a protein that's used to gain entry inside cells.

The team showed that the peptides can be used as targets to help researchers develop drugs that might block Ebola virus from entering into cells.

"In contrast to the most promising current approaches for Ebola treatment or prevention, which are species-specific, our 'universal' target will enable the selection of broad-spectrum inhibitors that should block all known—and likely future—Ebola strains," said Dr. Michael Kay, senior author of the Protein Science study.

More information:
Clinton, T. R., Weinstock, M. T., Jacobsen, M. T., Szabo-Fresnais, N., Pandya, M. J., Whitby, F. G., Herbert, A. S., Prugar, L. I., McKinnon, R., Hill, C. P., Welch, B. D., Dye, J. M., Eckert, D. M. and Kay, M. S. (2014), Design and characterization of ebolavirus GP prehairpin intermediate mimics as drug targets. Protein Science. doi: 10.1002/pro.2578

Provided by Wiley

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