Evidence Hub

Identification of potential inhibitors of the main protease from feline infectious peritonitis virus using molecular docking and dynamic simulation approaches

Khan MY, Shah AU, Duraisamy N, Moawad N, ElAlaoui RN, Cherkaoui M, Hemida MG

PeerJ, 2025

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Feline infectious peritonitis virus (FIPV) is one of cats' most serious viral infections. The FIPV infection induces a complicated syndrome in the affected cats, including immunosuppression and severe inflammatory conditions. Unfortunately, vaccines are unable to provide complete prevention in cats from getting infected with these viral infections. There is ongoing research on preparing antiviral therapies against FIPV in cats. However, these are still in clinical trials and have not been fully approved by the drug authorities in many countries, including the USA. Targeting the main viral proteases is one of the promising trends in the drug design of many viral diseases, including coronaviruses. The main goal of the current study was to repurpose and test the efficacy of some known antiviral drugs to treat FIPV infection in cats by targeting the FIPV main protease (Mpro).

METHODS: We used the in-silico prediction and molecular docking tools to screen and identify some drugs targeting FIPV-MPro to achieve these goals. The research method was started by building a screening pharmacokinetic associated variables of the compound, then used to design a new potential inhibitor by employing the docking and molecular dynamic simulation to evaluate the interaction of all complexes using the standard dynamics cascade protocol of Biovia Discovery studio.

RESULTS: Our results show that out of the 15 antiviral and immunomodulatory compounds, the top-ranked inhibitors for the…

Read the paper

Related studies

Go deeper in Evidence Hub

Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.

Open this study Sign up free