Abstract
Few Zika virus (ZIKV) outbreaks had been reported since its first detection in 1947, until the recent epidemics occurred in South America (2014/2015) and expeditiously became a global public health emergency. This arbovirus reached 0.5-1.3 million cases of ZIKV infection in Brazil in 2015 and rapidly spread in new geographic areas such as the Americas. Despite the mild symptoms of the Zika fever, the major concern is related to the related severe neurological disorders, especially microcephaly in newborns. Advances in ZIKV drug discovery have been made recently and constitute promising approaches to ZIKV treatment. In this review, we summarize current computational drug discovery efforts and their applicability to discovery of anti-ZIKV drugs. Lastly, we present successful examples of the use of computational approaches to ZIKV drug discovery.
Highlights
Computational drug discovery for the Zika virusFew Zika virus (ZIKV) outbreaks had been reported since its first detection in 1947, until the recent epidemics occurred in South America (2014/2015) and expeditiously became a global public health emergency
Zika virus (ZIKV) is an arbovirus that belongs to genus Flavivirus, the same genus of Dengue virus (DENV), Yellow Fever Virus (YFV) and West Nile Virus (WNV) (Wahid et al, 2016)
ZIKV virulence and its devastating consequences to humans requires that we quickly discover new antivirals to stop this virus
Summary
Few Zika virus (ZIKV) outbreaks had been reported since its first detection in 1947, until the recent epidemics occurred in South America (2014/2015) and expeditiously became a global public health emergency. This arbovirus reached 0.5-1.3 million cases of ZIKV infection in Brazil in 2015 and rapidly spread in new geographic areas such as the Americas. Advances in ZIKV drug discovery have been made recently and constitute promising approaches to ZIKV treatment. We summarize current computational drug discovery efforts and their applicability to discovery of anti-ZIKV drugs. We present successful examples of the use of computational approaches to ZIKV drug discovery
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