Approach Towards Drugs Repurposing: Docking Studies with Multiple Target Proteins Associated with SARS-CoV-2

The current pandemic outbreak of COVID-19 due to viral infections by SARS-CoV-2 is now become associated with severe commotion on global healthcare and economy. In this extreme situation when vaccine or drugs against COVID-19 are not available, the only quick and feasible therapeutic alternative would be the drug repurposing approach. In the present work, in silico screening of some antiviral and antiprotozoal drugs using Autodock docking tool was performed. Two known antiviral drugs sorivudine and noricumazole B are predicted to bind to the active site of the viral proteases namely cysteine like protease or 3CL protease (3CLpro) and papain like protease (PLpro) respectively with a highly favorable free energy of binding. Further, the promising molecules were subjected for checking their activity on other molecular targets like spike protein S1, RNA dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) and angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor. But the compounds were found not effective on rest other molecular targets.