New anti-viral drugs for the treatment of COVID-19 instead of favipiravir

Abstract

The SARS-CoV-2 virus is a major problem in the world right now. Currently, all the attention of research centers and governments globally are focused on the investigation of vaccination studies and the discovery of small molecules that inhibit the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the treatment of patients. The goal of this study was to locate small molecules to be used against COVID19 instead of favipiravir. Favipiravir analogues were selected as drug candidates from the PubChem web tool. The RNA dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) protein was selected as the target protein as favipiravir inhibits this protein in the human body. Initially, the inhibition activity of the studied compounds against RdRp of different virus types was investigated. Then, the inhibition properties of selected drug candidates and favipiravir were examined in detail against SARS-CoV-2 RdRp proteins. It was found that 2-oxo-1H-pyrazine-3-carboxamide performed better than favipiravir in the results of molecular docking, molecular mechanics Poisson-Boltzmann surface area (MM-PSBA) calculations, and ADME analyses.

Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma

Keywords:

• COVID19
• RNA polymerase
• favipiravir
• MM-PBSA
• ADME

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Scientific Research Project Fund of Sivas Cumhuriyet University (CUBAP) under the project number RGD-020. We thank all reviewers who helped improve this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.