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Full-Text Articles in Medicinal and Pharmaceutical Chemistry

Sars-Cov-2 Main Protease Inhibitors Repurposed For Hiv-1 Protease Binding, Jacob Minkkinen Apr 2022

Sars-Cov-2 Main Protease Inhibitors Repurposed For Hiv-1 Protease Binding, Jacob Minkkinen

CSB/SJU Distinguished Thesis

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV-2) led to the COVID-19 global pandemic, with over 460 million cases of infection and over 6 million deaths since the start of the pandemic. SARS-CoV-2 is a retrovirus that utilizes a main protease (Mpro). Mpro is a catalytic cys/his protease. Several treatments were proposed to stop the pandemic including repurposing drugs to inhibit the Mpro. Another retrovirus that uses a protease is human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) which has been a global epidemic for 40 years and is a devastating disease that attacks the immune system. HIV-1 has infected 79.5 million people and has killed an …


The Development Of Inhibitors For Sars-Cov-2 Orf8, My Thanh Thao Nguyen Apr 2022

The Development Of Inhibitors For Sars-Cov-2 Orf8, My Thanh Thao Nguyen

CSB/SJU Distinguished Thesis

An unexpected outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 caused a worldwide pandemic in 2020. Many repurposed drugs were tested, but there are currently only three FDA approved antivirals (Merck’s antiviral Molnupiravir, Pfizer’s antiviral Paxlovid, and Remdisivir).1 Most of the antiviral drugs tested SARS-CoV-2 main protease and RNA-dependent RNA polymerase. However, it is important to explore different drug targets of SARS-CoV-2 to prepare for the virus mutations of the future. This research looks at an alternative approach in which SARSCoV- 2 Open Reading Frame 8 (ORF8), which has been shown to be a rapidly evolving hypervariable gene, was chosen to be the protein of …