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Prions cause transmissible spongiform encephalopathies for which no treatment exists. Prions consist of PrPSc a misfolded and aggregated form of the cellular prion protein (PrPC). We explore the antiprion properties of luminescent conjugated polythiophenes (LCPs) that bind and stabilize ordered protein aggregates. By administering a library of structurally diverse LCPs to the brains of prion infected mice via osmotic minipumps we found that antiprion activity required a minimum of five thiophene rings bearing regularly spaced carboxyl side groups. Solid state nuclear magnetic resonance analyses and molecular dynamics simulations revealed that anionic side chains interacted with complementary regularly spaced cationic amyloid residues of model prions. These findings allowed us to extract structural rules governing the interaction between LCPs and protein aggregates which we then used to design a new set of LCPs with optimized binding. The new set of LCPs showed robust prophylactic and therapeutic potency in prion infected mice with the lead compound extending survival by >80 and showing activity against both mouse and hamster prions as well as efficacy upon intraperitoneal administration into mice. These results demonstrate the feasibility of targeted chemical design of compounds that may be useful for treating diseases of aberrant protein aggregation such as prion disease.

The role of the polymorphism Met or Val in position 129 in the human prion protein is well documented regarding disease susceptibility and clinical manifestations. However, little is known about the molecular background to this phenomenon. We investigated herein the conformational stability, amyloid fibrillation kinetics, and seeding propensity of different 129 mutants, located in β-strand 1 of PrP (Met129 (WT), M129A, M129V, M129L, M129W, M129P, M129E, M129K, and M129C) in HuPrP(90–231). The mutations M129V, M129L, M129K, and M129C did not affect stability (midpoints of thermal denaturation, Tm = 65–66 °C), whereas the mutants M129A and M129E and the largest side chain M129W were destabilized by 3–4 °C. The most destabilizing substitution was M129P, which lowered the Tm by 7.2 °C. All mutants, except for M129C, formed amyloid-like fibrils within hours during fibril formation under near physiological conditions. Fibril-forming mutants showed a sigmoidal kinetic profile and showed shorter lag times during seeding with preformed amyloid fibrils implicating a nucleated polymerization reaction. In the spontaneous reactions, the lag time of fibril formation was rather uniform for the mutants M129A, M129V, and M129L resembling the wild type. When the substituted amino acid had a distinct feature discriminating it from the wild type, such as size (M129W), charge (M129E, M129K), or rotational constraint (M129P), the fibrillation was impeded. M129C did not form ThT/Congo red-positive fibrils, and non-reducing SDS-PAGE of M129C during fibrillation conditions at different time points revealed covalent dimer formation already 15 min after fibrillation reaction initiation. Position 129 appears to be a key site for dictating PrP receptiveness toward recruitment into the amyloid state. funding agencies|EU-FP7 Health Programme Project LUPAS||Swedish Research Council||Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation||Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research||Linkoping University Center for Neuroscience