In silico investigations on the repurposing of antivirals for Covid-19 and pharmacophore modelling

Abstract

The pandemic COVID-19 has been spreading around the globe from December 2019 onwards and is considered the most infectious disease of this century. To date, there is no effective drug against SARS-CoV-2 discovered by pharmaceutical scientists, and the research is going rigorously all over the world. In this work, we examined the interaction of the already existing antivirals (Lopinavir, Atazanavir, and Remdesivir) with the structural proteins of SARS-CoV-2 using computational methods. Pharmacophore modeling of these drugs was conducted using molecular databases to determine the lead compounds from molecular databases. Pharmagist Webserver and Zinc Molecular Database were used to find out the pharmacophore and lead compounds, respectively. The drug-likeness properties of the compounds were evaluated by the SwissADME webserver. In silico studies showed that the binding affinities of the drugs followed the order Remdesivir > Atazanavir > Lopinavir. Docking and pharmacological studies revealed the potency and drug-likeness of the synthetic molecules.