scholarly journals Consensus Virtual Screening of Dark Chemical Matter and Food Chemicals Uncover Potential Inhibitors of SARS-CoV-2 Main Protease

Author(s):  
Marisa G. Santibáñez-Morán ◽  
Edgar López-López ◽  
Fernando D. Prieto-Martínez ◽  
Norberto Sánchez-Cruz ◽  
Jose L. Medina-Franco

The COVID-19 pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 has claimed more than 380,000 lives Worldwide and more than 6.5 million people are infected. Unfortunately, there is no drug or vaccine for the treatment of COVID-19. The increasing information available of key molecular targets of SARS-CoV-2 and active compounds against related coronavirus facilitates computational tools to rapidly suggest drug candidates for the treatment of COVID-19. As part of a global effort to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, herein we report a consensus virtual screening of large collections of food chemicals and compounds classified as Dark Chemical Matter. The rationale is to complement global efforts and explore regions of the chemical space currently underexplored. The consensus approach included combining similarity searching with various queries and fingerprints, molecular docking with two docking programs, and ADMETox profiling. We propose three compounds commercially available that were sent to experimental testing. We disclose the full list of virtual screening hits that can be subject to additional selection for acquisition or synthesis and experimental testing. This manuscript will be updated when the experimental testing of the selected compounds becomes available.

Author(s):  
Marisa G. Santibáñez-Morán ◽  
Edgar López-López ◽  
Fernando D. Prieto-Martínez ◽  
Norberto Sánchez-Cruz ◽  
Jose L. Medina-Franco

The COVID-19 pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 has claimed more than 380,000 lives Worldwide and more than 6.5 million people are infected. Unfortunately, there is no drug or vaccine for the treatment of COVID-19. The increasing information available of key molecular targets of SARS-CoV-2 and active compounds against related coronavirus facilitates computational tools to rapidly suggest drug candidates for the treatment of COVID-19. As part of a global effort to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, herein we report a consensus virtual screening of large collections of food chemicals and compounds classified as Dark Chemical Matter. The rationale is to complement global efforts and explore regions of the chemical space currently underexplored. The consensus approach included combining similarity searching with various queries and fingerprints, molecular docking with two docking programs, and ADMETox profiling. We propose three compounds commercially available that were sent to experimental testing. We disclose the full list of virtual screening hits that can be subject to additional selection for acquisition or synthesis and experimental testing. This manuscript will be updated when the experimental testing of the selected compounds becomes available.


RSC Advances ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (42) ◽  
pp. 25089-25099 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marisa G. Santibáñez-Morán ◽  
Edgar López-López ◽  
Fernando D. Prieto-Martínez ◽  
Norberto Sánchez-Cruz ◽  
José L. Medina-Franco

As part of a global effort to identify drug candidates for the treatment of COVID-19, herein, we report small molecules commercially available selected from a consensus virtual screening strategy.


Author(s):  
Carlos Javier Alméciga-Díaz ◽  
Luisa N. Pimentel-Vera ◽  
Angela Caro ◽  
Angela Mosquera ◽  
Camilo Andrés Castellanos Moreno ◽  
...  

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19) was first described in December 2019 in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China; and produced by a novel coronavirus designed as the acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Covid-19 has become a pandemic reaching over 1.3 million confirmed cases and 73,000 deaths. Several efforts have been done to identify pharmacological agents that can be used to treat patients and protect healthcare professionals. The sequencing of the virus genome not only has offered the possibility to develop a vaccine, but also to identified and characterize the virus proteins. Among these proteins, main protease (Mpro) has been identified as a potential therapeutic target, since it is essential for the processing other viral proteins. Crystal structures of SARS-CoV-2 Mpro and inhibitors has been described during the last months. To describe additional compounds that can inhibit SARS-CoV-2 Mpro, in this study we performed a molecular docking-based virtual screening against a library of experimental and approved drugs. Top 10 hits included Pictilisib, Nimorazole, Ergoloid mesylates, Lumacaftor, Cefuroxime, Cepharanhine, and Nilotinib. These compounds were predicted to have higher binding affinity for SARS-CoV-2 Mpro than previously reported inhibitors for this protein, suggesting a higher potential to inhibit virus replication. Since the identified drugs have both pre-clinical and clinical information, we consider that these results may contribute to the identification of treatment alternative for Covid-19. Nevertheless, in vitro and in vivo confirmation should be performed before these compounds could be translated to the clinic.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abhik Kumar Ray ◽  
Parth Sarthi Sen Gupta ◽  
Saroj Kumar Panda ◽  
Satyaranjan Biswal ◽  
Malay Kumar Rana

<p>COVID-19, responsible for several deaths, demands a cumulative effort of scientists worldwide to curb the pandemic. The main protease, responsible for the cleavage of the polyprotein and formation of replication complex in virus, is considered as a promising target for the development of potential inhibitors to treat the novel coronavirus. The effectiveness of FDA approved drugs targeting the main protease in previous SARS-COV (s) reported earlier indicates the chances of success for the repurposing of FDA drugs against SARS-COV-2. Therefore, in this study, molecular docking and virtual screening of FDA approved drugs, primarily of three categories: antiviral, antimalarial, and peptide, are carried out to investigate their inhibitory potential against the main protease. Virtual screening has identified 53 FDA drugs on the basis of their binding energies (< -7.0 kcal/mol), out of which the top two drugs Velpatasvir (-9.1 kcal/mol) and Glecaprevir (-9.0 kcal/mol) seem to have great promise. These drugs have a stronger affinity to the SARS-CoV-2 main protease than the crystal bound inhibitor α-ketoamide 13B (-6.7 kcal/mol) or Indinavir (-7.5 kcal/mol) that has been proposed in a recent study as one of the best drugs for SARS-CoV-2. The <i>in-silico</i> efficacies of the screened drugs could be instructive for further biochemical and structural investigation for repurposing. The molecular dynamics studies on the shortlisted drugs are underway. </p>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanjin Li ◽  
Yu Zhang ◽  
Yikai Han ◽  
Tengfei Zhang ◽  
Ranran Du

<p> Since its outbreak in 2019, the acute respiratory syndrome caused by SARS-Cov-2 has become a severe global threat to human. The lack of effective drugs strongly limits the therapeutic treatment against this pandemic disease. Here we employed a computational approach to prioritize potential inhibitors that directly target the core enzyme of SARS-Cov-2, the main protease, which is responsible for processing the viral RNA-translated polyprotein into functional proteins for viral replication. Based on a large-scale screening of over 13, 000 drug-like molecules, we have identified the most potential drugs that may suffice drug repurposing for SARS-Cov-2. Importantly, the second top hit is Beclabuvir, a known replication inhibitor of hepatitis C virus (HCV), which is recently reported to inhibit SARS-Cov-2 as well. We also noted several neurotransmitter-related ligands among the top candidates, suggesting a novel molecular similarity between this respiratory syndrome and neural activities. Our approach not only provides a comprehensive list of prioritized drug candidates for SARS-Cov-2, but also reveals intriguing molecular patterns that are worth future explorations.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zeynab Fakhar ◽  
Shama Khan ◽  
Suliman Y. AlOmar ◽  
Afrah Alkhuriji ◽  
Aijaz Ahmad

AbstractA new pathogen severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has spread worldwide and become pandemic with thousands new deaths and infected cases globally. To address coronavirus disease (COVID-19), currently no effective drug or vaccine is available. This necessity motivated us to explore potential lead compounds by considering drug repurposing approach targeting main protease (Mpro) enzyme of SARS-CoV-2. This enzyme considered to be an attractive drug target as it contributes significantly in mediating viral replication and transcription. Herein, comprehensive computational investigations were performed to identify potential inhibitors of SARS-CoV-2 Mpro enzyme. The structure-based pharmacophore modeling was developed based on the co-crystallized structure of the enzyme with its biological active inhibitor. The generated hypotheses were applied for virtual screening based PhaseScore. Docking based virtual screening workflow was used to generate hit compounds using HTVS, SP and XP based Glide GScore. The pharmacological and physicochemical properties of the selected lead compounds were characterized using ADMET. Molecular dynamics simulations were performed to explore the binding affinities of the considered lead compounds. Binding energies revealed that compound ABBV-744 binds to the Mpro with strong affinity (ΔGbind −45.43 kcal/mol), and the complex is more stable in comparison with other protein–ligand complexes. Our study classified three best compounds which could be considered as promising inhibitors against main protease SARS-CoV-2 virus.


Author(s):  
Anh-Tien Ton ◽  
Francesco Gentile ◽  
Michael Hsing ◽  
Fuqiang Ban ◽  
Artem Cherkasov

<div>The recently emerged 2019 Novel Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and associated COVID-19 disease cause serious or even fatal respiratory tract infection and yet no FDA-approved therapeutics or effective treatment is currently available to effectively combat the outbreak. This urgent situation is pressing the world to respond with the development of novel vaccine or a small molecule therapeutics for SARS-CoV-2. Along these efforts, the structure of SARS-CoV-2 main protease (Mpro) has been rapidly resolved and made publicly available to facilitate global efforts to develop novel drug candidates.</div><div>In recent month, our group has developed a novel deep learning platform – Deep Docking (DD) which enables very fast docking of billions of molecular structures and provides up to 6,000X enrichment on the top-predicted ligands compared to conventional docking workflow (without notable loss of information on potential hits). In the current work we applied DD to entire 1.3 billion compounds from ZINC15 library to identify top 1,000 potential ligands for SARS-CoV-2 Mpro. The compounds are made publicly available for further characterization and development by scientific community.</div>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sohini Chakraborti ◽  
Narayanaswamy Srinivasan

<p>The current global crisis due to COVID-19 has almost brought normal life to standstill in most parts of the world. With our research interest on repurposing known drugs/drug candidates targeting various diseases, we decided to analyse the available data on the deadly pathogen that has already taken thousands of lives since its outbreak in China in December 2019. Our host institute is now shutdown and we are confining ourselves to our homes with limited access to computational resources. Using a simple <i>in silico</i> approach based on the principle of ‘neighbourhood behaviour’ in three-dimensional (3D) space and two-dimensional (2D) space of protein and small molecules respectively, we have identified potential drugs/drug candidates which can be repurposed against protein targets encoded by the SARS-CoV-2 genome. Based on our preliminary analysis, we have so far prioritized more than 20 known drugs/drug candidates which might elucidate anti-coronavirus properties by binding to main protease of the pathogen. These drugs belong to diverse therapeutic areas such as antiviral, anticancer, antibacterial agents etc. Notably, apart from many synthetic molecules, our analysis also hints that phytochemicals obtained from vinca plant (vinca alkaloids) and camptotheca tree (camptothecin and its derivatives) have the potential to bind to main protease of SARS-CoV-2. In-depth investigation on our findings are currently on-going. Here we are presenting the results we obtained so far. The sole purpose of making these preliminary findings openly available to the community is for the experimental biologists and biomedical researchers to investigate our predictions in experimental set ups and for the clinicians to evaluate the potential of these findings for anti-COVID-19 treatment. <b>Our findings should only be used for research purposes and we strongly urge that no individual should interpret these findings for any self-diagnosis or self-medication without the prior approval from competent international health/medical regulatory agencies.</b></p>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shravan Kumar Gunda ◽  
Hima Kumari P ◽  
Gourav Choudhir ◽  
Anuj Kumar ◽  
P B. Kavi Kishor ◽  
...  

Abstract Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) causes coronavirus disease2019 (COVID-19). SARS-CoV-2 is known for its high pathogenicity and transmission due to thepresence of polybasic cleavage sites. No specific drug is available for the treatment. To identifythe potential inhibitors, we have performed molecular docking against the SARS-CoV-2 mainprotease (6Y84) with fifteen important natural xanthone compounds. The docking results showedall the compounds exhibited good binding energies and interactions with the main protease. Thevalidation of representative docking complexes through molecular dynamics simulations showedthat xanthones binds with a higher binding affinity and lower free energy than the standardligand with Brasixanthone C and Brasixanthone B on 50 ns. Natural xanthone compounds havealso passed the Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, and Excretion (ADME) property criteriaas well as Lipinski’s rule of five. The present integrated molecular docking and dynamicssimulations study unveil the use of xanthones as potential antiviral agents against SARS-CoV-2.


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