Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) is a new disease that emerged in Wuhan, China which spreads through close contact of people, often by small droplets produced during coughing or sneezing. Detail mechanism by which it spreads between people are under investigation. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared this disease as a pandemic after the severity of the disease increased. Many scientific reports gathered have suggested many drugs that could be potential candidates for the treatment. Although, clinical effectiveness has not been fully evaluated. In this review, we have aggregated the data from few research articles, official news websites and few review papers regarding its phylogenetic relation, genomic constitution, transmission, replication and in-silico analysis done by researchers for few potent drugs that are currently used to cure COVID-19. SARS-CoV-2 belongs to Betacoronavirus genus with Genome structure consists 14 Open Reading Frames (ORFs) that encode 27 proteins. Coronavirus replicates into the host cells having unique mechanisms like ribosome frame-shifting and synthesis of genomic and sub genomic RNAs. In-silico methods have the advantage that they can make fast predictions for a large set of compounds in a high-throughput mode and also make their prediction based on the structure of a compound even before it has been synthesized. In-silico softwares have been used to find or to improve a novel bioactive compound, which may exhibit a strong affinity to a particular target in the drug development process.
Main protease (Mpro) and Spike (S) proteins are said potential drug targets of COVID-19. Pneumonia like respiratory illness caused by SARS-CoV-2 is spreading rapidly due to its replication and transmission rate. Protease is the protein that is involved in both replication and transcription. Since CoV-2 shares, genomic similarity with CoV and MERS-CoV, drugs from previous outbreaks are used as primary treatment of the disease. In-silico drug development strategies are said to be faster and effective than in-vitro with a lesser amount of risk factors. Fragment Based Drug Designing (FBDD), also known as rational drug design in which a potential target protein is selected and docked with a lead-like molecule that eventually leads to drug development. Nine (9) drugs that are currently being used to treat patients of coronavirus were selected in this study from the latest literature review and fragmented as per rules followed by crosslinking of drug fragments using editor tools. These native drugs and synthesized drugs were then docked against the main protease. Results of the study revealed that one of the crosslinked lead-like compounds showed a higher binding affinity (∆G) more than any of the native compounds. Further, the results of this study suggested that the combination of potential drugs can be an effective way to develop new drugs to treat a deadly disease.
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