Phenylboronic-Acid-Modified Nanoparticles: Potential Antiviral Therapeutics

Phenylboronic-acid-modified nanoparticles (NPs) are attracting considerable attention for biological and biomedical applications. We describe here a convenient and general protocol for attaching multiple copies of para-substituted phenylboronic acid moieties onto either iron-oxide-, silica- or diamond-derived NPs. The boronic acid functionalized NPs are all fabricated by first modifying the surface of each particle type with 4-azidobenzoic ester functions. These azide-terminated nanostructures were then reacted with 4-[1-oxo-4-pentyn-1-yl) amino]phenylboronic acid units via a Cu(I) catalyzed Huisgen cycloaddition to furnish, conveniently, the corresponding boronic-acid modified NPs (or “borono-lectins”) targeted in this work. The potential of these novel “borono-lectins” as antiviral inhibitors was investigated against the Hepatitis C virus (HCV) exploiting a bioassay that measures the potential of drugs to interfere with the ability of cell-culture-derived JFH1 virus particles to infect healthy hepatocyt...