Abstract
The potential of computational models to identify new therapeutics and repurpose existing drugs has gained significance in recent times. The current ‘COVID-19’ pandemic caused by the new SARS CoV2 virus has affected over 200 million people and caused over 4 million deaths. The enormity and the consequences of this viral infection have fueled the research community to identify drugs or vaccines through a relatively expeditious process. The availability of high-throughput datasets has cultivated new strategies for drug development and can provide the foundation towards effective therapy options. Molecular modeling methods using structure-based or computer-aided virtual screening can potentially be employed as research guides to identify novel antiviral agents. This review focuses on in-silico modeling of the potential therapeutic candidates against SARS CoVs, in addition to strategies for vaccine design. Here, we particularly focus on the recently published SARS CoV main protease (Mpro) active site, the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) of SARS CoV2, and the spike S-protein as potential targets for vaccine development. This review can offer future perspectives for further research and the development of COVID-19 therapies via the design of new drug candidates and multi-epitopic vaccines and through the repurposing of either approved drugs or drugs under clinical trial.
Highlights
The current review summarizes the existing studies in this field, thereby offering an overview that could help ingenerating further findings, including the conversion of virtual screening results into clinically applied therapies using in vitro and in vivo techniques against COVID-19
In addition to computational methods, specific antibodies can be used as drugs to reduce COVID-19 symptoms and outcomes through the interactions of specific antibodies with SARS CoV2 proteins [127]
There is a requisite for the development of tandem therapeutics owing to the multitude of viral infections
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The current research studies are mainly focused on the utilization [18] provides the necessary guidelines and support for regulation, ethics, and platform of antiviral drugs and repurposing strategies, as well as vaccine development [6,12,13,14,15,16,17]. While alternate strategies including stem cells, immunotherapy, and plant-based therapeutics, the need to ensure the safety of clinical trials means an ideal solution has not been found for the current scenario; there is a huge scope for exploiting the wide spectrum of existing antivirals to target SARS CoV2 virus. This review can be used as the basis for the future development of coronavirus therapeutics
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