potentially highly effective drugs for covid-19: virtual screening and molecular docking study through pyrx-vina approach

Introduction: the world health organization (who) has declared the novel coronavirus (covid-2019) infection outbreak a global health emergency. drug repurposing, which concerns the investigation of existing drugs for new therapeutic target indications, has emerged as a successful strategy for drug discovery due to the reduced costs and expedited approval procedures.material and methods: the crystal structure of a protein essential for virus replication has been filed in the protein data bank recently. based on this structure and existing experimental datasets for sars-cov2(covid-19) we present results deriving from the virtual screening of a database of more than 1000 drugs in the drugbank that have been approved by food and drug administration (fda).results: results showed that some of the known protease inhibitors currently used in hiv and cancer infections might be helpful for the therapy of covid-19 also. results also showed that levomefolic acid, or vitamin b9, is recommended therapy because of its oral sources and no side effects.conclusion: between all studied fda-approved drug, vitaminb9 and etoposide which used for hiv protease inhibitor, revealed strong interaction with protease binding pocket and placed well into the pocket even better than the lopinavir-ritonavir, and since this compound is fda-approved and successfully passed various testing steps, therefor there is a hope that this drug, could be a potential drug to treating the covid-19.