AI-Aided Design of Novel Targeted Covalent Inhibitors against SARS-CoV-2

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Abstract

The drug repurposing of known approved drugs (e.g., lopinavir/ritonavir) has failed to treat SARS-CoV-2-infected patients. Therefore, it is important to generate new chemical entities against this virus. As a critical enzyme in the lifecycle of the coronavirus, the 3C-like main protease (3CLpro or Mpro) is the most attractive target for antiviral drug design. Based on a recently solved structure (PDB ID: 6LU7), we developed a novel advanced deep Q-learning network with a fragment-based drug design (ADQN–FBDD) for generating potential lead compounds targeting SARS-CoV-2 3CLpro. We obtained a series of derivatives from the lead compounds based on our structure-based optimization policy (SBOP). All of the 47 lead compounds obtained directly with our AI model and related derivatives based on the SBOP are accessible in our molecular library. These compounds can be used as potential candidates by researchers to develop drugs against SARS-CoV-2.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.03.03.972133: (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

    No key resources detected.


    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and 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: Please consider improving the rainbow (“jet”) colormap(s) used on page 19. At least one figure is not accessible to readers with colorblindness and/or is not true to the data, i.e. not perceptually uniform.


    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.

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