Corona virus disease
(COVID-19) is a dangerous disease rapidly
spreading all over the world today. Currently there are no treatment
options for it. Drug repurposing studies explored the potency of antimalarial
drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, against SARS-CoV-2 virus.
These drugs can inhibit the viral protease, called chymotrypsin-like
cysteine protease, also known as Main protease (3CL
pro
);
hence, we studied the binding efficiencies of 4-aminoquinoline and
8-aminoquinoline analogs of chloroquine. Six compounds furnished better
binding energies than chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine. The interactions
with the active site residues especially with Cys145 and His41, which
are involved in catalytic diad for proteolysis, make these compounds
potent main protease inhibitors. A regression model correlating binding
energy and the molecular descriptors for chloroquine analogs was generated
with
R
2
= 0.9039 and
Q
2
= 0.8848. This model was used to screen new analogs
of primaquine and molecules from the Asinex compound library. The
docking and regression analysis showed these analogs to be more potent
inhibitors of 3CL
pro
than hydroxychloroquine and primaquine.
The molecular dynamic simulations of the hits were carried out to
determine the binding stabilities. Finally, we propose four compounds
that show drug likeness toward SARS-CoV-2 that can be further validated
through in vitro and in vivo studies.