1. Academic Validation
  2. Anti-HCV, nucleotide inhibitors, repurposing against COVID-19

Anti-HCV, nucleotide inhibitors, repurposing against COVID-19

  • Life Sci. 2020 May 1;248:117477. doi: 10.1016/j.lfs.2020.117477.
Abdo A Elfiky 1
Affiliations

Affiliation

  • 1 Biophysics Department, Faculty of Sciences, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt; College of Applied Medical Sciences, University of Al-Jouf, Saudi Arabia. Electronic address: abdo@sci.cu.edu.eg.
Abstract

Aims: A newly emerged Human Coronavirus (HCoV) is reported two months ago in Wuhan, China (COVID-19). Until today >2700 deaths from the 80,000 confirmed cases reported mainly in China and 40 other countries. Human to human transmission is confirmed for COVID-19 by China a month ago. Based on the World Health Organization (WHO) reports, SARS HCoV is responsible for >8000 cases with confirmed 774 deaths. Additionally, MERS HCoV is responsible for 858 deaths out of about 2500 reported cases. The current study aims to test anti-HCV drugs against COVID-19 RNA dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp).

Materials and methods: In this study, sequence analysis, modeling, and docking are used to build a model for Wuhan COVID-19 RdRp. Additionally, the newly emerged Wuhan HCoV RdRp model is targeted by anti-polymerase drugs, including the approved drugs Sofosbuvir and Ribavirin.

Key findings: The results suggest the effectiveness of Sofosbuvir, IDX-184, Ribavirin, and Remidisvir as potent drugs against the newly emerged HCoV disease.

Significance: The present study presents a perfect model for COVID-19 RdRp enabling its testing in silico against anti-polymerase drugs. Besides, the study presents some drugs that previously proved its efficiency against the newly emerged viral Infection.

Keywords

COVID-19; Docking; Nucleotide inhibitors; RdRp; Sofosbuvir; Structural bioinformatics; Wuhan coronavirus.

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