Evaluation of Drug Repositioning by Molecular Docking of Pharmaceutical Resources to Identification of Potential SARS-CoV-2 Viral Inhibitors

Abstract

Unfortunately, to date, there is no approved specific antiviral drug treatment against COVID-19. Due to the costly and time-consuming nature of the de novo drug discovery and development process, in recent days, the computational drug repositioning method has been highly regarded for accelerating the drug-discovery process. The selection of drug target molecule(s), preparation of an approved therapeutics agent library, and in silico evaluation of their affinity to the subjected target(s) are the main steps of a molecular docking-based drug repositioning process, which is the most common computational drug re-tasking process. In this chapter, after a review on origin, pathophysiology, molecular biology, and drug development strategies against COVID-19, recent advances, challenges as well as the future perspective of molecular docking-based drug repositioning for COVID-19 are discussed. Furthermore, as a case study, the molecular docking-based drug repurposing process was planned to screen the 3CLpro inhibitor(s) among the nine Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved antiviral protease inhibitors. The results demonstrated that Fosamprenavir had the highest binding affinity to 3CLpro and can be considered for more in silico, in vitro, and in vivo evaluations as an effective repurposed anti-COVID-19 drug.