Highly functionalized cyclic beta-amino acid moieties as promising scaffolds in peptide research and drug design

Peptide-based drug research has received high attention in the field of medicinal chemistry over the past decade. For drug design, to improve proteolytic stability, it is desirable to include unnatural building blocks, such as conformationally restricted beta-amino acid moieties, into the peptide sequence. Accordingly, the synthesis and incorporation of such conformationally rigid systems into novel type of peptides has gained large interest. Our research group has designed highly efficient methods for the construction of potential antimicrobial peptides. Moreover, a number of synthetic approaches have been developed for the synthesis of various pharmacologically interesting cyclic beta-amino acid derivatives as monomers with multiple stereogenic centers

Nat Commun

Peptides have gained so much attention in the last decade that they are now part of the main strategies, with small molecules and biologics, for developing new medicines. Despite substantial progress, the successful development of peptides as drugs still requires a number of limitations to be addressed, including short in vivo half-lives and poor membrane permeability. Here, we describe the use of oligourea foldamers as tool to improve the pharmaceutical properties of GLP-1, a 31 amino acid peptide hormone involved in metabolism and glycemic control. Our strategy consists in replacing four consecutive amino acids of GLP-1 by three consecutive ureido residues by capitalizing on the structural resemblance of oligourea and α-peptide helices. The efficacy of the approach is demonstrated with three GLP-1-oligourea hybrids showing prolonged activity in vivo. Our findings should enable the use of oligoureas in other peptides to improve their pharmaceutical properties and may provide new therapeutic applications