Potent toxic effects of Taroxaz-104 on the replication of SARS-CoV-2 particles

Polyphenolics and 1,3,4-oxadiazoles are two of the most potent bioactive classes of compounds in medicinal chemistry, since both are known for their diverse pharmacological activities in humans. One of their prominent activities is the antimicrobial/antiviral activities, which are much apparent when the key functional structural moieties of both of them meet into the same compounds. The current COVID-19 pandemic motivated us to computationally screen and evaluate our library of previously-synthesized 2-(3,4,5-trihydroxyphenyl)-1,3,4-oxadiazoles against the major SARS-CoV-2 protein targets. Interestingly, few ligands showed promising low binding free energies (potent inhibitory interactions/affinities) with the active sites of some coronaviral-2 enzymes, specially the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (nCoV-RdRp). One of them was 5,5'-{5,5'-[(1R,2R)-1,2-dihydroxyethane-1,2-diyl]bis(1,3,4-oxadiazole-5,2-diyl)}dibenzene-1,2,3-triol (Taroxaz-104), which showed significantly low binding energies (-10.60 and -9.10 kcal/mol) with nCoV-RdRp-RNA and nCoV-RdRp alone, respectively. These binding energies are even considerably lower than those of remdesivir potent active metabolite GS-443902 (which showed -9.20 and -7.90 kcal/mol with the same targets, respectively). Further computational molecular investigation revealed that Taroxaz-104 molecule strongly inhibits one of the potential active sites of nCoV-RdRp (the one with which GS-443902 molecule mainly interacts), since it interacts with at least seven major active amino acid residues of its predicted pocket. The successful repurposing of Taroxaz-104 has been achieved after the promising results of the anti-COVID-19 biological assay were obtained, as the data showed that Taroxaz-104 exhibited very significant anti-COVID-19 activities (anti-SARS-CoV-2 EC₅₀ = 0.42 μM) with interesting effectiveness against the new strains/variants of SARS-CoV-2. Further investigations for the development of Taroxaz-104 and its coming polyphenolic 2,5-disubstituted-1,3,4-oxadiazole derivatives as anti-COVID-19 drugs, through in vivo bioevaluations and clinical trials research, are urgently needed.