Discovery of Potential SARS-CoV-2N Protein Inhibitors by Docking-Based Virtual Screening

The SARS- CoV-2 is a highly infectious, novel strain of the corona virus family that is responsible for the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. Members of the family Corona viridae have been known to cause a broad spectrum of animal and human diseases but they did not garner much interest owing to the mild nature of the respiratory disorders. But post 2003, the emergence of SARS-CoV, the more recent MERS-CoV and undoubtedly the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 has established significant cause for the family to be considered a threat to public health. In this study, we attempted to discover potential drug candidates against a specific constituent protein, the nucleocapsid (N) protein, of SARS-CoV-2. The target protein was virtually screened in multiple stages against a library of ligands compiled from the ZINC database, and the selected potential drug candidates were further filtered based on their ADMET profiles.