Peptide inhibition of human cytomegalovirus infection

Melnik, Lilia I; Garry, Robert F; Morris, Cindy A

Currently available drugs to treat HCMV infection are not approved to treat pregnant women due to their potential high toxicity. HCMV infected neonates are treated with these toxic compounds only in cases of high morbidity. The antiviral peptide-based agents that may be developed as a result of this study would not require activation by virally encoded proteins, further phosphorylation by cellular enzymes or incorporation into the growing viral DNA by viral DNA polymerase as the current therapeutics do. Such peptide therapeutics would be predicted not to provoke drug-induced resistance that is a significant problem with existing FDAapproved therapeutics to treat HCMV infection, since they employ a different mechanism of action. Our cell viability assays demonstrate that the effective peptides have no statistically significant toxicity at the highest concentrations tested in our studies (data not shown). Consequently, we do not expect adverse effects or toxicity due to treatments developed from these synthetic peptides.