Antiviral drugs against Ebola: A structure based virtual screening approach

Abstract

Repression of highly lethal Ebola virus outbreaks poses a serious public health challenge. Ebola haemorrhagic fever is a highly lethal disease for which there are no effective therapeutic or preventative treatments. Hence, there is a necessity to discover new candidate drugs that could have the capability to contain Ebola. Structure based virtual screening method is a method that could accelerate the drug discovery process. In this study, various known antiviral drugs were used as ligands to screen for their binding ability to Ebola proteins by using protein ligand docking. As the crystal structure of the Ebola proteins were not available, these structures were predicted using PS2 or RABTOR X and the predicted structures were validated using Ramachandran plot. Six of the existing drugs exhibited a better binding affinity to various Ebola proteins; they could be used as lead compounds in developing a better drug for controlling Ebola.