Due to the pivotal roles that protein-protein interactions play in a plethora of biological processes, the design of therapeutic agents targeting these interactions has become an attractive and important area of research. The development of such agents is faced with a variety of challenges. Nevertheless, considerable progress has been made in the design of proteomimetics capable of disrupting protein-protein interactions. Those inhibitors based on molecular scaffold designs hold considerable interest because of the ease of variation in regard to their displayed functionality. In particular, protein surface mimetics, alpha-helical mimetics, beta-sheet/beta-strand mimetics, as well as beta-turn mimetics have successfully modulated protein-protein interactions involved in such diseases as cancer and HIV. In this review, current progress in the development of molecular scaffolds designed for the disruption of protein-protein interactions will be discussed with an emphasis on those active against biological targets.

We demonstrate that a focused library based on truncated, cross-linked interfacial peptides of HIV-1 protease produces effective dimerization inhibitors of the enzyme. By combining individual changes of the library into a single compound, we obtained a significantly more potent agent and found that an additive increase in inhibitor efficacy was obtained. The good activity of library members against an active-site drug-resistant protease mutant bodes well for dimerization inhibition as a complementary method to targeting the active site.

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