Favipiravir, umifenovir and camostat mesylate: a comparative study against SARS-CoV-2

  1. Mehnmet Altay Unal
  2. Omur Besbinar
  3. Hasan Nazir
  4. Gokce Yagmur Summak
  5. Fatma Bayrakdar
  6. Lucia Gemma Delogu
  7. Tambay Taskin
  8. Sibel Aysil Ozkan
  9. Kamil Can Akcali
  10. Acelya Yilmazer

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Abstract

Since the first cases the coronavirus disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) reported in December 2019, worldwide continuous efforts have been placed both for the prevention and treatment of this infectious disease. As new variants of the virus emerge, the need for an effective antiviral treatment continues. The concept of preventing SARS-CoV-2 on both pre-entry and post-entry stages has not been much studied. Therefore, we compared the antiviral activities of three antiviral drugs which have been currently used in the clinic. In silico docking analyses and in vitro viral infection in Vero E6 cells were performed to delineate their antiviral effectivity when used alone or in combination. Both in silico and in vitro results suggest that the combinatorial treatment by favipiravir and umifenovir or camostat mesylate has more antiviral activity against SARS-CoV-2 rather than single drug treatment. These results suggest that inhibiting both viral entry and viral replication at the same time is much more effective for the antiviral treatment of SARS-CoV-2.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2022.01.11.475889: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    Experimental Models: Cell Lines
    SentencesResources
    Viruses were propagated in Vero E6 cells by using DMEM media containing 2% FBS and 1% antibiotics.
    Vero E6
    suggested: RRID:CVCL_XD71)
    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    In silico calculations: The chemical structures of umifenovir, camostat mesylate and favipiravir were downloaded from the PubChem (https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) with the CID numbers 131411, 5284360 and 492405 respectively.
    PubChem
    suggested: (PubChem, RRID:SCR_004284)
    https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
    suggested: (PubChem BioAssay, RRID:SCR_010734)
    - Dassault Systèmes®), and then the PDB file format of proteins were converted into PDBQT file format using default parameters of AutoDock (ver.1.5.7) software (Trott and Olson, 2009).
    AutoDock
    suggested: (AutoDock, RRID:SCR_012746)
    Comparison between groups was performed by one-way ANOVA, followed by a Tukey’s post hoc multiple comparisons by the statistics program GraphPad.
    GraphPad
    suggested: (GraphPad Prism, RRID:SCR_002798)

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

    About SciScore

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2022.01.11.475889v1 on bioRxiv