In Silico Approach for Pro-inflammatory Protein Interleukin 1β and Interleukin-1 Receptor Antagonist Protein Docking as Potential Therapy for COVID-19 Disease

Abstract

Background: Interleukin-1 receptor antagonist (IL-1Ra) also known as Anakinra is a receptor antagonist of IL-1 especially IL-1β. IL-1β increased in infected COVID-19 patient groups. This study aimed that the IL-1Ra contained in Conditioned Medium Wharton’s Jelly Mesenchymal Stem Cells (CM-WJMSCs) has the potential to inhibit IL-1β which is one of the cytokine storms that occur in COVID patients through an in-silico approach. Objective: This study aims to determine the effect of in silico approach pro-inflammatory protein interleukin 1β (IL-1 β) and interleukin-1 receptor antagonist protein as  cytokine WJ-MSCs for potential treatment of COVID-19 disease. Methods: 3D structure using the homology modeling method on Swiss Model web-server.  Molecular docking was performed to analyze the binding mode of the IL-1β related to COVID-19 with IL-1Ra and the docking results were fixed using FireDock web-server. Results: These results of the docking of proteins between IL-1β and the CM-WJMSCs component, namely IL-1Ra showed that IL-1Ra has criteria for docking on IL-1β such as the good score for QMEAN, good CscoreLB, and BS-score results, and the lowest energy obtained was -585.1 KJ/mol. It can be predicted that IL-1Ra can inhibit IL-1β which causes cytokine storms in COVID-19 patients.  Conclusion: So that there is a potential treatment of CM-WJMSCs on the severity of Covid-19 infection.