Stem Cell Therapy: A Promising Approach in Treatment of COVID-19.

COVID-19 pandemic is a global health crisis of the 21st Century. There are currently no approved vaccines and no particular anti-viral treatment for coronavirus disease. As COVID-19 has a broad range of illnesses, it is necessary to find a safe and effective therapeutic method for COVID-19. An attractive approach for treating COVID-19 is cell therapy. Cell therapy aims to inject new and healthy stem cells into a patient's body, to repair the damaged cells and tissues. Stem cell therapy is one of the most studied and important approaches in the treatment of COVID-19 these days. The significant clinical outcome was observed by the adoptive transfer of stem cells, specifically mesenchymal stem cells. This study reviews the characteristics of stem cells and clinical trials that have used stem cells in treating COVID-19.

Modelling studies reveal the importance of the C-terminal inter motif loop of NSP1 as a promising target site for drug discovery and screening of potential phytochemicals to combat SARS-CoV-2.

COVID-19 pandemic causative SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is still rapid in progression and transmission even after a year. Understanding the viral transmission and impeding the replication process within human cells are considered as the vital point to control and overcome COVID-19 infection. Non-structural Protein 1, one among the proteins initially produced upon viral entry into human cells, instantly binds with the human ribosome and inhibit the host translation process by preventing the mRNA attachment. However, the formation of NSP1 bound Ribosome complex does not affect the viral replication process. NSP1 plays an indispensable role in modulating the host gene expression and completely steals the host cellular machinery. The full-length structure of NSP1 is essential for the activity in the host cell and importantly the loop connecting N and C-terminal domains are reported to play a role in ribosome binding. Due to the unavailability of the experimentally determined full-length structure of NSP1, we have modelled the complete structure using comparative modelling and the stability and conformational behaviour of the modelled structure was evaluated through molecular dynamics simulation. Interestingly, the present study reveals the significance of the inter motif loop to serves as a potential binding site for drug discovery experiments. Further, we have screened the phytochemicals from medicinal plant sources since they were used for several hundred years that minimizes the traditional drug development time. Among the 5638 phytochemicals screened against the functionally associated binding site of NSP1, the best five phytochemicals shown high docking score of -9.63 to -8.75 kcal/mol were further evaluated through molecular dynamics simulations to understand the binding affinity and stability of the complex. Prime MM-GBSA analysis gave the relative binding free energies for the top five compounds (dihydromyricetin, 10-demethylcephaeline, dihydroquercetin, pseudolycorine and tricetin) in the range of -45.17 kcal/mol to -37.23 kcal/mol, indicating its binding efficacy in the predicted binding site of NSP1. The density functional theory calculations were performed for the selected five phytochemicals to determine the complex stability and chemical reactivity. Thus, the identified phytochemicals could further be used as effective anti-viral agents to overcome COVID-19 and as well as several other viral infections.