Synthesis and evaluation of a deltic guanidinium analogue of a cyclic RGD peptide.

A guanidine group is abundantly found in natural products and drugs. Guanidine has the highest basicity among many common functional groups in nature. Because of its high basicity, it generally exists as a protonated guanidinium and functions as a cationic hydrogen bond donor. Finding an appropriate bioisostere of guanidinium is challenging because of its high basicity and unique trigonal planar shape. In this study, we explored the possibility of "deltic guanidinium" as a bioisostere of guanidinium using a cyclic arginine-glycine-aspartic acid (RGD) peptide as a parent compound. We synthesized c(deltic RGDyK), in which a guanidinium group of an arginine residue in c(RGDyK) is replaced with deltic guanidinium. A target binding assay, biodistribution study, and metabolic stability assay were conducted with c(deltic RGDyK) and its radioiodinated variant. The deltic guanidinium analog peptides exhibited similar biological properties to the parent peptides and improved in vivo stability, indicating that deltic guanidinium could work as a unique bioisostere of guanidinium.