Discovery of novel thieno3,2-bpyrrole 5-carboxamides as potent inhibitors of Chikungunya virus

摘要

Chikungunya fever(CHIKF)is an arboviral disease that typically consists of an acute illness with fever,skin rash,and incapacitating arthralgia.The causative agent of CHIKF is Chikungunya virus(CHIKV),an alphavirus that is transmitted by the Aedes mosquitoes.Despite the re-emergence of CHIKV as an epidemic threat,there is no approved effective anti-viral treatment currently available for CHIKV.In our preliminary studies,selected small molecule inhibitors of arboviruses related to CHIKV were investigated and this led us to identify compounds with thieno[3,2-b]pyrrole scaffold as hits.Building on the discovery of our best hit compounds,5-carboxylic acid thieno[3,2-b]pyrrole 1 and 5-carboxamide thieno[3,2-b]pyrrole 2,the main aim of this study is to optimize their anti-viral activities by synthesizing analogs of thieno[3,2-b]pyrroles 1 and 2 and examine their activities against CHIKV.In these two parallel optimization studies,we synthesized two series of thieno[3,2-b]pyrroles,namely the 5-carboxylic acids and 5-carboxamides that possessed a variety of substituents at N4,C2,C6 or C5positions of the thieno[3,2-b]pyrrole scaffold.These compounds were then examined for their cytotoxicity effects and anti-viral activities using a luminescence-labelled CHIKV infectious clone.The most potent compound in our studies was found in the 5-carboxamide series.The synthesis,biological activity and structure-activity relationship(SAR)will be presented and discussed in detail.