Novel Generated Peptides for COVID-19 Targets
Allison M. Rossetto, Wenjin Zhou · 2020
With the world in the midst of a global pandemic, it is important to be able to quickly generate new drug-like compounds for drug research purposes. While some successful work has been done [3, 6] there is still much work to be done, especially as viruses like Coronavirus are notoriously hard to treat. Since peptide drugs are generally better at blocking protein-protein interactions than small molecule drugs [5], something important in anti-viral work, we will use our GANDALF methodology to generate new peptides to interact with targets of interest. Here we are working with two important COVID-19 targets: the SARS-CoV-2 main protease (M[Pro]) and the andangiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2). Covid-19 is able to enter human cells via interaction between its spike protein and ACE2 and, once in the cell, MPro breaks down polyproteins to create more of the virus [1].