BIOSTATISTICAL APPROACH TO AVAILABLE ANTIVIRAL TARGETS FOR CONQUERING COVID-19

Corona virus is one of the significant pathogens which damages the human respiratory functioning. Deaths and casualties caused by coronaviruses (CoVs) include the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)-CoV and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS)-CoV. The aim of the work was to compare several antiviral drugs and find out which is the most active drug against MERS, SARS and COVID -19 and also to determine correlation coefficient (r) for binding affinity of these compounds between MERS, COVID-19 targets and SARS, COVID-19 targets. In this study Molecular Docking approach was used to determine the binding affinities of 62 antiviral molecules. The study was carried out using Molegro Virtual Docker 6.0 with PDB 5DUS, 3V3M, 6W63 procured from RCSB Protein Data Bank (PDB). Indinavir, Saquinavir, Simeprevir were discovered to be most potent having MolDock scores -190.337, -206.847, -239.807 when docked with PDB 5DUS, 3V3M, 6W63 respectively. The correlation coefficient (r) was calculated to be 0.97 for binding affinity of compounds between MERS and COVID-19 targets whereas 0.94 for relating SARS and COVID-19 targets. Further studies may be conducted to design more potent analogue and defeat COVID-19.