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The significant role of curcumin against SARS-CoV-2 drug targets to thwart virus replication and binding into the host system using the computational biology paradigm approach.

Computer-Aided Drug Designing (CADD) has gained a wide popularity among biologists and chemists as a part of interdisciplinary drug discovery approach. It plays a vital role in the discovery, design and analysis of drugs in pharmaceutical industry. It is extensively used to reduce cost, time and speed up the early stage development of biologically new active molecules. In the current review we presented a brief review of CADD, merits and demerits, DNA, protein and enzyme as targets, types of CADD: Structure Based Drug Designing (SBDD), Ligand Based Drug Designing (LBDD), Pharmacophore based drug designing (PBDD) and Fragment Based Drug Designing (FBDD), theory behind the types of CADD and their applications. The review also focuses on the in-silico pharmokinetic, pharmacodynamic and toxicity filters or predictions that play a major role in identifying the drug like molecules. Currently in pharmaceutical sciences computational tools and software are exhibiting imperative role in the different stages of drug discovery hence the review throws light on various commercial and freeware available for each step of CADD.

Solid tumours are highly refractory to immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) therapies due to the functional impairment of effector T cells and their inefficient trafficking to tumours. T-cell activation is negatively regulated by C-terminal Src kinase (CSK); however, the exact mechanism remains unknown. Here we show that the conserved oncogenic tyrosine kinase Activated CDC42 kinase 1 (ACK1) is able to phosphorylate CSK at Tyrosine 18 (pY18), which enhances CSK function, constraining T-cell activation. Mice deficient in the Tnk2 gene encoding Ack1, are characterized by diminished CSK Y18-phosphorylation and spontaneous activation of CD8+ and CD4+ T cells, resulting in inhibited growth of transplanted ICB-resistant tumours. Furthermore, ICB treatment of castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) patients results in re-activation of ACK1/pY18-CSK signalling, confirming the involvement of this pathway in ICB insensitivity. An ACK1 small-molecule inhibitor, (R)-9b, recapitulates inhibition of ICB-resistant tumours, which provides evidence for ACK1 enzymatic activity playing a pivotal role in generating ICB resistance. Overall, our study identifies an important mechanism of ICB resistance and holds potential for expanding the scope of ICB therapy to tumours that are currently unresponsive.

The discovery of cyclin-dependent kinases (CDK) and their mechanism in regulating the cell cycle process was considered a game-changer in cancer therapy.