Drug Repurposing in Antiviral Research: A Current Scenario

Abstract

Better understand the unexplored parts of the drugs you know than the drugs unidentified. Drug repurposing is a promising, fast and cost-effective method that can overcome traditional de novo drug discovery and development challenges of targeting various diseases and disorders. Drug repurposing, the process of identifying new uses for the existing or candidate drugs is an effective strategy for drug discovery in various diseases. Identifying new drugs and new target is significant in today's world with a new disease emerging every day. With increase in number of the emerging viral infections day by day, the targeted therapies for those are not discovered in parallel. The drug repurposing approach has given many promising drug candidates for various viral infectious diseases like Ebola, ZIKA, dengue, influenza, HIV, HSV, CMV infections and various other infectious diseases. The emergence of resistance to existing antiviral drugs and re-emerging viral infections are the biggest challenges in the antiviral drug discovery. The drug repurposing approach is an assuring strategy in finding new potential antiviral agents within a short span of time to overcome the challenges in antiviral therapy. In this review, we describe the most promising results of the drug repurposing approach in the treatment of various infectious diseases.This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as the author is credited and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.

Marine natural compounds as potents inhibitors against the main protease of SARS-CoV-2—a molecular dynamic study

“…Unfortunately, the timeline for characterizing a typical drug discovery process badly couples with the urgency of finding a therapy. It is important to accelerate the early stages of the drug discovery for all possible future emergencies (Mani et al, 2019). The early extraction of the COVID-19 genome to highlight sequence identity ($80% of conserved nucleotides) with respect to the original SARS-CoV (Gralinski & Menachery, 2020) has paved the way for rapid research.…”

Computational insights into tetracyclines as inhibitors against SARS-CoV-2 Mpro via combinatorial molecular simulation calculations

“…To facilitate the rapid drug discovery, computational drug repurposing approaches have been established as an effective method to reveal the new indications from already known drugs with the aid of computational algorithms such as molecular docking simulation and molecular dynamics simulation to predict the drug-target interactions and binding stability, respectively [21,22]. Previously, computational drug repurposing approaches were employed to identify the potential drug candidates against viral infections, including Ebola, ZIKA, dengue, and influenza infections [23], and for HCoVs such as SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV [24][25][26]. Also, nonpeptidic active-site-directed inhibition of SARS-CoV M pro was discovered by a combination of screening and docking methods [27].…”

Natural and nature-inspired stilbenoids as antiviral agents

“…The Ebola outbreak in West Africa (2014e2016) became the deadliest occurrence of the disease since its discovery in 1976, and finally the viral pneumonia outbreak, caused by 2019-nCoV, started in China in December 2019 and officially declared as a pandemic by WHO on 11 th March 2020 [2]. According to WHO, it is imperative to find new antiviral agents, including those against drug-resistant and vaccine immunity escaping viral strains [3], or finding new therapeutic indications for existing approved FDA-drugs (the so-called "drug repurposing" approach) in order to reduce time and cost for drug development for infectious diseases [4].…”