The novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that has emerged from Wuhan, China in December 2019 has spread to almost all countries in the World causing a dramatic number of deaths. The current absence of antiviral treatment against the SARS-CoV-2 urges the scientific community to accelerate the drug discovery research process.
One way to identify potential treatments and to be able to administer it swiftly is to focus on drug repurposing studies, i.e. to investigate the SARS-CoV-2 antiviral potential of drugs that have already been approved for human use.
Proteins that are crucial for the survival and replication of the virus are the most attractive targets for such studies. We have focused on the SARS-CoV-2 main protease (3CLpro) that plays an essential role in the virus replication process by screening ~2000 approved drugs against this particular protein. We used for that our HADDOCK software, powered by the HTC resources of EOSC/EGI.
More details and initial results are now available online here.