Finding lead compounds for dengue antivirals from a collection of old drugs through in silico target prediction and subsequent in vitro validation.

Dengue virus (DENV) infection is one of the most widely spread flavivirus infections. Despite the fatality it could cause, no antiviral treatment is currently available to treat the disease. Hence, this study aimed to repurpose old drugs as novel DENV NS3 inhibitors. Ligand-based (L-B) and proteochemometric (PCM) prediction models were built using 62,354 bioactivity data to screen for potential NS3 inhibitors. Selected drugs were then subjected to the foci forming unit reduction assay (FFURA) and protease inhibition assay. Finally, molecular docking was performed to validate these results. The in silico studies revealed that both models performed well in the internal and external validations. However, the L-B model showed better accuracy in the external validation in terms of its sensitivity (0.671). In the in vitro validation, all drugs (zileuton, trimethadione, and linalool) were able to moderately inhibit the viral activities at the highest concentration tested. Zileuton showed comparable results with linalool when tested at 2 mM against the DENV NS3 protease, with a reduction of protease activity at 17.89 and 18.42%, respectively. Two new compounds were also proposed through the combination of the selected drugs, which are ziltri (zilueton + trimethadione) and zilool (zileuton + linalool). The molecular docking study confirms the in vitro observations where all drugs and proposed compounds were able to achieve binding affinity ≥ −4.1 kcal/mol, with ziltri showing the highest affinity at −7.7 kcal/mol, surpassing the control, panduratin A. The occupation of both S1 and S2 subpockets of NS2B-NS3 may be essential and a reason for the lower binding energy shown by the proposed compounds compared to the screened drugs. Based on the results, this study provided five potential new lead compounds (ziltri, zilool, zileuton, linalool, and trimethadione) for DENV that could be modified further.

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