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A Review of Computational Approaches Targeting SARS-CoV-2 Main Protease to the Discovery of New Potential Antiviral Compounds.

The new pandemic produced by coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has becomes the biggest challenge that the world is facing today. It has been creating a devastating global crisis, causing countless deaths and great panic. The search for an effective treatment remains a global challenge owing to controversies on available vaccines. A huge research effort (clinical, experimental, and computational) has emerged in response to this pandemic, and more than 125000 research reports have been published in relation with COVID-19. The majority of them focused on the discovery of novel drug candidates or repurposing of existing drugs through computational approaches that significantly speed up drug discovery. Among the different used targets, the SARS-CoV-2 main protease (Mpro), which plays an essential role in coronavirus replication, has become the preferred target for computational studies. In this review, we examine a representative set of computational studies that uses the Mpro as target for the discovery of COVID-19 small molecules. They will be divided into two main groups, structure-based, and ligand-based methods, and each one will be subdivided according to the strategies used in the research. From our point of view, the use of combined strategies could enhance the possibilities of success in the future, permitting to develop more rigorous computational studies in future efforts to combat current and future pandemics.