Antivirals are indispensable tools that can be targeted at viral domains directly or at cellular domains indirectly to obstruct viral infections and reduce pathogenicity. Despite their transformative use in healthcare, antivirals have been clinically approved to treat only 10 of the more than 200 known pathogenic human viruses. Additionally, many virus functions are intimately coupled with host cellular processes, which presents challenges in antiviral development due to the limited number of clear targets per virus, necessitating extensive insight into these molecular processes. Compounding this challenge, many viral pathogens have evolved to evade effective antivirals. We hypothesize that a viral attachment blocking chimera (VirABloC) composed of a viral binder and a bulky scaffold that sterically blocks interactions between a viral particle and a host cell may be suitable for the development of antivirals that are agnostic to the extravirion epitope that is being bound. We test this hypothesis by modifying a nanobody that specifically recognizes a nonessential epitope presented on the extravirion surface of pseudorabies virus strain 486 with a 3-dimensional wireframe DNA origami structure ∼100 nm in diameter. The nanobody switches from having no inhibitory properties to 4.2 ± 0.9 nM IC50 when conjugated with the DNA origami scaffold. Mechanistic studies support that inhibition is mediated by the noncovalent attachment of the DNA origami scaffold to the virus particle, which obstructs the attachment of the viruses onto host cells. These results support the potential of VirABloC as a generalizable approach to developing antivirals.
Keywords: DNA nanotechnology; Multivalent inhibitor; PRV; Steric blocking; Viral inhibitor.