The alternative strategy for designing covalent drugs through kinetic effects of pi-stacking on the self-assembled nanoparticles: a model study with antibiotics.

It is still a huge challenge to find a new strategy for rationally designing covalent drugs because most of them are discovered by serendipity. Considering that the effect of covalent drugs is closely associated with the kinetics of the reaction between drug molecule and its target protein, here we first demonstrate an example of the kinetic effect of pi-stacking of drug molecules on covalent antimicrobial drug design. When PEGylated 7-aminocephalosporanic acid (PEG-ACA) is used as a substrate drug, pi-stacking of  the ACA group via the self-assembly of PEG-ACA on the surface of gold nanoparticles (i.e. Au@ACA) exhibits antibacterial activity against E. coli fourfold higher than a PEG-ACA monomer does. The reason can be reasonably attributed to the kinetic rate enhancement for the covalent reaction between Au@ACA and penicillin binding proteins. We believe that the self-assembly of functional groups onto the surface of gold nanoparticles represents a new strategy for covalent drug design.