Repurposing nonnucleoside antivirals against SARS-CoV2 NSP12 (RNA dependent RNA polymerase): In silico-molecular insight

Begum, Feroza; Srivastava, Amit Kumar; Ray, Upasana

The pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 has necessitated expedited research efforts towards finding potential antiviral targets and drug development measures. While new drug discovery is time consuming, drug repurposing has been a promising area for elaborate virtual screening and identification of existing FDA approved drugs that could possibly be used for targeting against functions of various proteins of SARS-CoV-2 virus. RNA dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) is an important enzyme for the virus that mediates replication of the viral RNA. Inhibition of RdRp could inhibit viral RNA replication and thus new virus particle production. Here, we screened non-nucleoside antivirals and found three out of them to be strongest in binding to RdRp out of which two retained binding even using molecular dynamic simulations. We propose these two drugs as potential RdRp inhibitors which need further in-depth testing.