COVID-19 Repurposed Therapeutics Targeting the Viral Protease and Spike-protein:ACE2 Interface using MD-based Pharmacophore and Consensus Virtual Screening

Molecular dynamics (MD) and enhanced sampling MD was performed for 100 ns on the biological assembly of the COVID-19 protease (6LU7), and a template of the COVID-19 S-protein:ACE2 receptor interface (99.88% coverage of 6M0J; model03, swissmodel). Apo-site pharmacophores of the resulting structural clusters were used to mine the FDA database (8700 compounds), and a multi-target library was developed from MD-based hits in high affinity sites across 100 ns. Consensus hits from high throughput docking in crystal structures 5R82, 6LU7 and 6Y2F (protease), and 6VW1 (S-protein:ACE2) were also added, and the resulting libraries were re-docked into MD sites to collect potential COVID-19 re-purposed therapeutics by estimated binding energies.