Plant-derived antiviral drugs as novel hepatitis B virus inhibitors: Cell culture and molecular docking study

Parvez, Mohammad K.; Tabish Rehman, Md.; Alam, Perwez; Al-Dosari, Mohammed S.; Alqasoumi, Saleh I.; Alajmi, Mohammed F.

Owing to similarity with retroviral replication mechanism, almost all the approved drugs against human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and herpes simplex virus (HSV) have been proved effective against HBV. Unfortunately, despite their high efficacies, majority of approved anti-HBV drugs have some therapeutic limitations. While long-term treatment with HBV Pol inhibitors, the nucleot(s)ide analogs (e.g., lamivudine, adepovir, entecavir etc.) leads to the emergence of drug-resistance in the Pol 'Tyr-Met-Asp-Asp (YMDD)' motif, the interferon (pegIFN-a) chemotherapy causes adverse side-effects in some patients (Lok et al., 2007; Locarnini et al., 2008) . In addition, despite the global success of vaccinations, reports of vaccine-escape HBV mutants present https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsps.2018.12.008 1319-0164/Ó 2018 The Authors. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). another hurdle (Teo and Locarnini, 2010, Torresi, 2008) . Moreover, in low-income countries, various political and socio-economic factors further hamper the prevention and control of CHB.