QadirVID-19: A fusion inhibitor against Novel Coronavirus-2019 for specific management of COVID-19.

Qadir, Muhammad Imran

With the emergence of COVID-19 (Corona virus Disease 19), the workers tried to search the drug/s for its management. Chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine and protease inhibitors including Ritonavir have been tested. But the safety and efficacy of these drugs for the treatment of COVID-19 were not very strong. Fusion inhibitors may be used for the management or prophylaxis of viral diseases. Objective of the present study was to design a fusion inhibitor for specific management of COVID-19. A series of BLAST was performed to get an optimized and conservative region of the spike protein of the virus which is used in fusion process. Based on the recent data available, residue 1160-1189 of spike protein of Novel coronavirus-2019 (2019-nCoV) was found highly conserved region with 100% similarity, with maximum score of 99.5 and with an E-value of 5e-24. Thus, this sequence was selected as a drug. This drug is a synthetic peptide composed of 30 amino acids of Heptad Repeat 2 (HR2) region of spike protein of 2019-nCoV and was named as QadirVID-19 (Qadir, name of the scientist who developed it and VID-19 from COVID-19).