Delta unveiled

AxyS Pharmaceuticals Inc. published for the first time details of its Delta technology, which had been described previously as a structure-based drug design approach for finding specific potent protease inhibitors.

As published last week in Nature, the basis for Delta boils down to the use of zinc ions to generate inhibitors with a higher affinity and specificity for the active site of the target enzyme. AXPH (South San Francisco, Calif.) and collaborators at the University of California at San Francisco studied the structure of the complex between the serine protease trypsin and a small molecule inhibitor known as BABIM, and found that a zinc ion was bound by the complex and enhanced the inhibition of the enzyme...