Direct acting anti-hepatitis C combinations as potential COVID-19 protease inhibitors

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic could be the most threatening outbreak in the twenty-first century. According to the latest records of world health organization, more than 130 millions have been infected by COVID-19, with more than 2.9 million reported deaths. Yet, there is no magic cure for treatment of COVID-19. The concept of drug repurposing has been introduced as a fast, life-saving approach for drug discovery. Drug repurposing infers investigating already approved drugs for new indications, using the available information about pathophysiology of diseases and pharmacodynamics of drugs. In a recent work, more than 3000 FDA approved drugs were tested using virtual screening as potential antiviral agents for COVID-19. In this work, the top ranked five hits from the previous docking results together with drugs of similar chemical feature and/or mechanistic destinations were further tested using AutoDock Vina. The results showed that anti-HCV combinations could be potential therapeutic regimens for COVID-19 infections.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13337-021-00691-6.

Keywords: Anti-hepatitis C combinations; AutoDock Vina; COVID-19; Coronavirus pandemic; Direct acting antiviral agent.

Fig. 1

Overview of drug discovery process showing the timeframe of each stage

Fig. 2

The life cycle of SARS-CoV-2 showing the possible target site

Fig. 3

Data base used for screening for potential COVID-19 protease inhibitor including Contini’s top five hits, similar chemical feature and/or mechanistic destinations to the top five hits and compared the reported promising drugs COVID-19