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In patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), a single neoplastic antigen-specific B cell accumulates and overgrows other B cells, leading to immune deficiency. CLL is often treated with drugs that ablate all B cells, leading to further weakening of humoral immunity, and a more focused therapeutic strategy capable of targeting only the pathogenic B cells would represent a significant advance. One approach to this would be to develop synthetic surrogates of the CLL antigens allowing differentiation of the CLL cells and healthy B cells in a patient. Here, we describe nonpeptidic molecules capable of targeting antigen-specific B cell receptors with good affinity and selectivity using a combinatorial library screen. We demonstrate that our hit compounds act as synthetic antigen surrogates and recognize CLL cells and not healthy B cells. Additionally, we argue that the technology we developed can be used to identify other classes of antigen surrogates., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The discovery of new compounds for the pharmacological manipulation of protein function often embraces the screening of compound collections, and it is widely recognized that natural products offer beneficial characteristics as protein ligands. Much effort has therefore been focused on 'natural product-like' libraries, yet the synthesis and screening of such libraries is often limited by one or more of the following: modest library sizes and structural diversity, conformational heterogeneity and the costs associated with the substantial infrastructure of modern high-throughput screening centres. Here, we describe the design and execution of an approach to this broad problem by merging principles associated with biologically inspired oligomerization and the structure of polyketide-derived natural products. A novel class of chiral and conformationally constrained oligomers is described (termed 'chiral oligomers of pentenoic amides', COPA), which offers compatibility with split-and-pool methods and can be screened en masse in a batch mode. We demonstrate that a COPA library containing 160,000 compounds is a useful source of novel protein ligands by identifying a non-covalent synthetic ligand to the DNA-binding domain of the p53 transcription factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]