Related Experiment Video
Updated: Feb 20, 2026
Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship, Activity Prediction, and Molecular Dynamics of Non-nucleotide Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors
Published on: May 9, 2025
Identification of novel bifunctional HIV-1 reverse transcriptase inhibitors
Ming-Tain Lai1, Paul Tawa2, Anick Auger2
1Department of Antiviral Research, MRL, West Point, PA 19486, USA.
Objectives:
The increasing prevalence of mutations in HIV-1 reverse transcriptase (RT) that confer resistance to existing NRTIs and NNRTIs underscores the need to develop RT inhibitors with novel mode-of-inhibition and distinct resistance profiles.
Methods:
Biochemical assays were employed to identify inhibitors of RT activity and characterize their mode of inhibition. The antiviral activity of the inhibitors was assessed by cell-based assays using laboratory HIV-1 isolates and MT4 cells. RT variants were purified via avidin affinity columns.
Results:
Compound A displayed equal or greater potency against many common NNRTI-resistant RTs (K103N and Y181C RTs) relative to WT RT. Despite possessing certain NNRTI-like properties, such as being unable to inhibit an engineered variant of RT lacking an NNRTI-binding pocket, we found that compound A was dependent on Mg2+ for binding to RT. Optimization of compound A led to more potent analogues, which retained similar activities against WT and K103N mutant viruses with submicromolar potency in a cell-based assay. One of the analogues, compound G, was crystallized in complex with RT and the structure was determined at 2.6 Å resolution. The structure indicated that compound G simultaneously interacts with the active site (Asp186), the highly conserved primer grip region (Leu234 and Trp229) and the NNRTI-binding pocket (Tyr188).
Conclusions:
These findings reveal a novel class of RT bifunctional inhibitors that are not sensitive to the most common RT mutations, which can be further developed to address the deficiency of current RT inhibitors.
