RESUMEN
Antiviral therapeutics to treat SARS-CoV-2 are much desired for the on-going pandemic. A well-precedented viral enzyme is the main protease (MPro), which is now targeted by an approved drug and by several investigational drugs. With the inevitable liabilities of these new drugs, and facing viral resistance, there remains a call for new chemical scaffolds against MPro. We virtually docked 1.2 billion non-covalent and a new library of 6.5 million electrophilic molecules against the enzyme structure. From these, 29 non-covalent and 11 covalent inhibitors were identified in 37 series, the most potent having an IC 50 of 29 μM and 20 μM, respectively. Several series were optimized, resulting in inhibitors active in the low micromolar range. Subsequent crystallography confirmed the docking predicted binding modes and may template further optimization. Together, these compounds reveal new chemotypes to aid in further discovery of MPro inhibitors for SARS-CoV-2 and other future coronaviruses.
RESUMEN
An outbreak of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19 respiratory disease, has infected over 290,000 people since the end of 2019, killed over 12,000, and caused worldwide social and economic disruption1,2. There are currently no antiviral drugs with proven efficacy nor are there vaccines for its prevention. Unfortunately, the scientific community has little knowledge of the molecular details of SARS-CoV-2 infection. To illuminate this, we cloned, tagged and expressed 26 of the 29 viral proteins in human cells and identified the human proteins physically associated with each using affinity-purification mass spectrometry (AP-MS), which identified 332 high confidence SARS-CoV-2-human protein-protein interactions (PPIs). Among these, we identify 66 druggable human proteins or host factors targeted by 69 existing FDA-approved drugs, drugs in clinical trials and/or preclinical compounds, that we are currently evaluating for efficacy in live SARS-CoV-2 infection assays. The identification of host dependency factors mediating virus infection may provide key insights into effective molecular targets for developing broadly acting antiviral therapeutics against SARS-CoV-2 and other deadly coronavirus strains.