The discovery of IDX21437: Design, synthesis and antiviral evaluation of 2'-α-chloro-2'-ß-C-methyl branched uridine pronucleotides as potent liver-targeted HCV polymerase inhibitors.

Herein we describe the discovery of IDX21437 35b, a novel RPd-aminoacid-based phosphoramidate prodrug of 2'-α-chloro-2'-ß-C-methyluridine monophosphate. Its corresponding triphosphate 6 is a potent inhibitor of the HCV NS5B RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp). Despite showing very weak activity in the in vitro Huh-7 cell based HCV replicon assay, 35b demonstrated high levels of active triphosphate 6 in mouse liver and human hepatocytes. A biochemical study revealed that the metabolism of 35b was mainly attributed to carboxyesterase 1 (CES1), an enzyme which is underexpressed in HCV Huh-7-derived replicon cells. Furthermore, due to its metabolic activation, 35b was efficiently processed in liver cells compared to other cell types, including human cardiomyocytes. The selected RP diastereoisomeric configuration of 35b was assigned by X-ray structural determination. 35b is currently in Phase II clinical trials for the treatment of HCV infection.

Synthesis of potent and broad genotypically active NS5B HCV non-nucleoside inhibitors binding to the thumb domain allosteric site 2 of the viral polymerase.

The hepatitis C virus (HCV) NS5B RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) plays a central role in virus replication. NS5B has no functional equivalent in mammalian cells and, as a consequence, is an attractive target for selective inhibition. This Letter describes the discovery of a new family of HCV NS5B non-nucleoside inhibitors, based on the bioisosterism between amide and phosphonamidate functions. As part of this program, SAR in this new series led to the identification of IDX17119, a potent non-nucleoside inhibitor, active on the genotypes 1b, 2a, 3a and 4a. The structure and binding domain of IDX17119 were confirmed by X-ray co-crystallization study.

In-depth molecular and phenotypic characterization in a rice insertion line library facilitates gene identification through reverse and forward genetics approaches.

We report here the molecular and phenotypic features of a library of 31,562 insertion lines generated in the model japonica cultivar Nipponbare of rice (Oryza sativa L.), called Oryza Tag Line (OTL). Sixteen thousand eight hundred and fourteen T-DNA and 12,410 Tos17 discrete insertion sites have been characterized in these lines. We estimate that 8686 predicted gene intervals--i.e. one-fourth to one-fifth of the estimated rice nontransposable element gene complement--are interrupted by sequence-indexed T-DNA (6563 genes) and/or Tos17 (2755 genes) inserts. Six hundred and forty-three genes are interrupted by both T-DNA and Tos17 inserts. High quality of the sequence indexation of the T2 seed samples was ascertained by several approaches. Field evaluation under agronomic conditions of 27,832 OTL has revealed that 18.2% exhibit at least one morphophysiological alteration in the T1 progeny plants. Screening 10,000 lines for altered response to inoculation by the fungal pathogen Magnaporthe oryzae allowed to observe 71 lines (0.7%) developing spontaneous lesions simulating disease mutants and 43 lines (0.4%) exhibiting an enhanced disease resistance or susceptibility. We show here that at least 3.5% (four of 114) of these alterations are tagged by the mutagens. The presence of allelic series of sequence-indexed mutations in a gene among OTL that exhibit a convergent phenotype clearly increases the chance of establishing a linkage between alterations and inserts. This convergence approach is illustrated by the identification of the rice ortholog of AtPHO2, the disruption of which causes a lesion-mimic phenotype owing to an over-accumulation of phosphate, in nine lines bearing allelic insertions.

HBV replication inhibitors.

Chronic Hepatitis B Virus infections afflict >250 million people and kill nearly 1 million annually. Current non-curative therapies are dominated by nucleos(t)ide analogs (NAs) that profoundly but incompletely suppress DNA synthesis by the viral reverse transcriptase. Residual HBV replication during NA therapy contributes to maintenance of the critical nuclear reservoir of the HBV genome, the covalently-closed circular DNA, and to ongoing infection of naive cells. Identification of next-generation NAs with improved efficacy and safety profiles, often through novel prodrug approaches, is the primary thrust of ongoing efforts to improve HBV replication inhibitors. Inhibitors of the HBV ribonuclease H, the other viral enzymatic activity essential for viral genomic replication, are in preclinical development. The complexity of HBV's reverse transcription pathway offers many other potential targets. HBV's protein-priming of reverse transcription has been briefly explored as a potential target, as have the host chaperones necessary for function of the HBV reverse transcriptase. Improved inhibitors of HBV reverse transcription would reduce HBV's replication-dependent persistence mechanisms and are therefore expected to become a backbone of future curative combination anti-HBV therapies.

Large-scale characterization of Tos17 insertion sites in a rice T-DNA mutant library.

We characterized the insertion sites of newly transposed copies of the tissue-culture-induced ty1-copia retrotransposon Tos17 in the Oryza Tag Line (OTL) T-DNA mutant library of rice cv. Nipponbare. While Nipponbare contains two native copies of Tos17 the number of additional copies, deduced from Southern blot analyses in a subset of 384 T-DNA lines and using a reverse transcriptase probe specific to the element, ranged from 1 to 8 and averaged 3.37. These copies were shown to be stably inherited and to segregate independently in the progenies of insertion lines. We took advantage of the absence of EcoRV restriction sites in the immediate vicinity of the 3' LTR of the native copies of Tos17 in the genome sequence of cv. Nipponbare, thereby preventing amplification of corresponding PCR fragments, to efficiently and selectively amplify and sequence flanking regions of newly transposed Tos17 inserts. From 25,286 T-DNA plants, we recovered 19,252 PCR products (76.1%), which were sequenced yielding 14,513 FSTs anchored on the rice pseudomolecules. Following elimination of redundant sequences due to the presence of T-DNA plants deriving from the same cell lineage, these FSTs corresponded to 11,689 unique insertion sites. These unique insertions exhibited higher densities in subtelomeric regions of the chromosomes and hot spots for integration, following a distribution that remarkably paralleled that of Tos17 sites in the National Institute for Agrobiological Sciences (NIAS) library. The insertion sites were mostly found in genic regions (77.5%) and preferably in coding sequences (68.8%) compared to unique T-DNA insertion sites in the same materials (49.1% and 28.3%, respectively). Predicted non- transposable element (TE) genes prone to a high frequency of Tos17 integration (i.e. from 5 to 121 inserts) in the OTL T-DNA collection were generally found to be also hot spots for integration in the NIAS library. The 9,060 Tos17 inserts inserted into non TE genes were found to disrupt a total of 2,773 genes with an average of 3.27 inserts per gene, similar to that in the NIAS library (3.28 inserts per gene on average) whereas the 4,472 T-DNA inserted into genes in the same materials disrupted a total of 3,911 genes (1.14 inserts per gene on average). Interestingly, genes disrupted by both Tos17 and T-DNA inserts in the library represented only 14.9% and 10.6% of the complement of genes interrupted by Tos17 and T-DNA inserts respectively while 52.1% of the genes tagged by Tos17 inserts in the OTL library were found to be tagged also in the NIAS Tos17 library. We concluded that the first advantage in characterizing Tos17 inserts in a rice T-DNA collection lies in a complementary tagging of novel genes and secondarily in finding other alleles in a same genetic background, thereby greatly enhancing the library genome coverage and its overall value for implementing forward and reverse genetics strategies.