Kynomycin

Recently, through comprehensive medicinal chemistry efforts, we have found a new daptomycin analogue, termed kynomycin, showing enhanced activity against both methicillin-resistant S. aureus and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus in vitro and in vivo, with improved pharmacokinetics and lower cytotoxicity than daptomycin.

In this study we compared the physicochemical properties of kynomycin with those of daptomycin from an atomic perspective by using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy and Molecular Dynamics simulations.

We observed that kynurenine methylation changes daptomycin's key physicochemical properties; its calcium dependent oligomerization efficiency is improved and the modified kynurenine strengths contacts with the lipid tail and tryptophan residues. In addition, it is observed that, compared to daptomycin, kynomycin tetramer is more stable and binds stronger to calcium. The combined experiments provide key clues for the improved antibacterial activity of kynomycin.

We expect that this approach will help study the calcium binding and oligomerization features of new calcium dependent peptide antibiotics.

Daptomycin is effective in treating infections caused by antibiotic-resistant Gram-positive pathogens, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), vancomycin-resistant Enterococci (VRE), and vancomycin-resistant S. aureus (VRSA). Due to its distinct mechanism of action toward multidrug-resistant bacteria, daptomycin provides an attractive structural motif to generate new daptomycin-based antibiotics to combat the problem of bacterial resistance. In this study, we used the total synthesis method to produce daptomycin analogues with a variety in terms of types and sites of modifications. Five classes of daptomycin analogues were synthesized, and the antimicrobial activities of the analogues were analyzed by several biological assays. From this study, we established a comprehensive structure-activity relationship of daptomycin which will lay the foundation for the further development of daptomycin-based antibiotics.