Improving the positional adaptability: structure-based design of biphenyl-substituted diaryltriazines as novel non-nucleoside HIV-1 reverse transcriptase inhibitors

In order to improve the positional adaptability of our previously reported naphthyl diaryltriazines (NP-DATAs), synthesis of a series of novel biphenyl-substituted diaryltriazines (BP-DATAs) with a flexible side chain attached at the C-6 position is presented. These compounds exhibited excellent potency against wild-type (WT) HIV-1 with EC(50) values ranging from 2.6 to 39 nmol/L and most of them showed low nanomolar anti-viral potency against a panel of HIV-1 mutant strains. Compounds 5j and 6k had the best activity against WT, single and double HIV-1 mutants and reverse transcriptase (RT) enzyme comparable to two reference drugs (EFV and ETR) and our lead compound NP-DATA (1). Molecular modeling disclosed that the side chain at the C-6 position of DATAs occupied the entrance channel of the HIV-1 reverse transcriptase non-nucleoside binding pocket (NNIBP) attributing to the improved activity. The preliminary structure–activity relationship and PK profiles were also discussed.