A novel computational drug screening strategy, combined with lab experiments, suggest that pralatrexate, a chemotherapy medication originally developed to treat lymphoma, could potentially be repurposed to treat COVID-19. Haiping Zhang, PhD, of the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology in Shenzhen, China, and colleagues presented these findings in the open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology in an article published on December 31, 2020. The article is titled “A Novel Virtual Screening Procedure Identifies Pralatrexate As Inhibitor of SARS-CoV-2 Rdrp and It Reduces Viral Replication in Vitro.” With the COVID-19 pandemic causing illness and death worldwide, better treatments are urgently needed. One shortcut could be to repurpose existing drugs that were originally developed to treat other conditions. Computational methods can help identify such drugs by simulating how different drugs would interact with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID -19. To aid virtual screening of existing drugs, Dr. Zhang and colleagues combined multiple computational techniques that simulate drug-virus interactions from different, complementary perspectives. They used this hybrid approach to screen 1,906 existing drugs for their potential ability to inhibit replication of SARS-CoV-2 by targeting a viral protein called RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRP). The novel screening approach identified four promising drugs, which were then tested against SARS-CoV-2 in lab experiments. Two of the drugs, pralatrexate and azithromycin, successfully inhibited replication of the virus. Further lab experiments showed that pralatrexate more strongly inhibited viral replication than did remdesivir, a drug that is currently used to treat some COVID -19 patients.Login Or Register To Read Full Story