Article
作者: Zhang, Hongbo ; Dai, Jun ; Huang, Bo ; Wei, Dandan ; Liu, Man ; Liu, Lijie ; Yan, Mengrong ; Rao, Zihe ; Yang, Qi ; Huang, Xupeng ; Zhong, Yihang ; Chen, Zhao ; Shi, Yongxia ; Zhao, Jincun ; Tang, Zhenhao ; Wang, Yiliang ; Zhang, Wei ; Peng, Wei ; Sun, Zeyun ; Zhu, Airu ; Wang, Dong ; Zhao, Yao ; Zhao, Li ; Tang, Jielin ; Sun, Jing ; Yang, Haitao ; Chen, Xinwen
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has resulted in millions of deaths and continues to pose serious threats to global public health. The main protease (Mpro) of SARS-CoV-2 is crucial for viral replication and its conservation, making it an attractive drug target. Here, we employed a structure-based drug design strategy to develop and optimize novel inhibitors targeting SARS-CoV-2 Mpro. By fully exploring occupation of the S1, S2, and S3/S4 binding pockets, we identified eight promising inhibitors with half-maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) values below 20 nM. The cocrystal structure of Mpro with compound 10 highlighted the crucial roles of the interactions within the S3/S4 pockets in inhibitor potency enhancement. These findings demonstrated that expanding the utilization of these binding pockets was an effective strategy for developing noncovalent small molecule inhibitors that target SARS-CoV-2 Mpro. Compound 4 demonstrated outstanding in vitro antiviral activity against wild-type SARS-CoV-2 with an EC50 of 9.4 nM. Moreover, oral treatment with compounds 1 and 9 exhibited excellent antiviral potency and substantially ameliorated virus-induced tissue damage in the lungs of Omicron BA.5-infected K18-human ACE2 (K18-hACE2) transgenic mice, indicating that these novel noncovalent inhibitors could be potential oral agents for the treatment of COVID-19.