Mechanistic insights of key host proteins and potential repurposed inhibitors regulating SARS-CoV-2 pathway

30 September 2021, Version 1
This content is a preprint and has not undergone peer review at the time of posting.

Abstract

The emergence of pandemic situations originated from SARS-CoV-2 and its new variants created worldwide medical emergencies. Due to the non-availability of efficient drugs and vaccines, hundreds of thousands of people succumbed to death intoxicated by this virus. At these emergency hours, repurposing existing drugs can effectively treat patients critically infected by SARS-CoV-2. Using a high-throughput screening approach, we validated a list of potential repurposed drugs, like Nafamostat, Camostat, Silmitasertib, Valproic acid, Zotatifin, and essential host target proteins HDAC2, eIF4E2, CSK22, that are essential for viral mechanism. We determined multiple dissociation pathways of repurposed drugs, suggesting the availability of sub pockets within the host target proteins. We showed the preferential residues involved in the (un)binding kinetics of the ligands correlated to the underlying mechanism of the host protein activity. Interestingly, the residues we obtained for HDAC2 and CSK22 target proteins, which we highlighted, are also involved in the catalytic activity. The mechanistic insight presented in this work is envisaged to help use these key host proteins and potential repurposed drugs as a treatment for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Keywords

host proteins
drug repurposing
dissociation pathways
metadynamics

Supplementary materials

Title
Description
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Title
Mechanistic insights of key host proteins and potential repurposed inhibitors regulating SARS-CoV-2 pathway
Description
Table showing the interacting residues of target protein that remain in contact with the respective drug molecules for more than 75% of the simulation time; hydrophobic and π-π interaction between the ligand-target; minimum distance plot of the protein residues with that of ligand heavy atoms and minimum distance plot with cut-off 0.2 nm; normalized probability distribution with distance cut-off for all six systems.
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