The goal of this collaboration is to follow up on recent discoveries to exploit a critical protein-protein interaction in B. burgdorferi that dictates infectivity of Lyme disease agents to identify small molecule inhibitors of this interaction. During this period, the project team worked to optimize and miniaturize the B. burgdorferi protein-protein interaction assay to eventually enable quantitative high-throughput screening. Future efforts are intended to include completion of the full qHTS screen of a selection of NCGC's small molecule libraries, following by hit validation, activity profiling, and eventually advancement toward medicinal chemistry optimization of select hit molecules.
