An all-out assault on SARS-CoV-2 replication

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic has had a huge impact on public health with over 165 million people infected, 3.4 million deaths and a hugely deleterious effect on most economies. While vaccination effectively protects against the disease it is likely that viruses will evolve that can replicate in hosts immunised with the present vaccines. Thus, there is a great unmet need for effective antivirals that can block the development of serious disease in infected patients. The seven papers published in this issue of the Biochemical Journal address this need by expressing and purifying components required for viral replication, developing biochemical assays for these components and using the assays to screen a library of pre-existing pharmaceuticals for drugs that inhibited the target in vitro and inhibited viral replication in cell culture. The candidate drugs obtained are potential antivirals that may protect against SARS-CoV-2 infection. While not all the antiviral candidates will make it through to the clinic, they will be useful tool compounds and can act as the starting point for further drug discovery programmes.

Development of a simple and miniaturized sandwich-like fluorescence polarization assay for rapid screening of SARS-CoV-2 main protease inhibitors

“…Thus, Mpro has been considered to be a promising therapeutic target for the development of antiviral agents [ 6 – 8 ]. Currently, the screening and characterization of novel Mpro inhibitors using a rapid, simple and miniaturized HTS assay are of crucial importance [ 21 ].…”

“…At present, COVID-19 is becoming a serious health care crisis globally because frequent mutations of SARS-CoV-2 increase the infectivity to human and reduce the effectiveness of approved vaccines [ 18 – 20 ]. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop a simple, miniaturized and cheap HTS assay for rapid screening of novel antiviral agents targeting SARS-CoV-2 Mpro [ 21 ].…”