Discovery of novel inhibitors against main protease (Mpro) of SARS-CoV-2 via virtual screening and biochemical evaluation

SARS-CoV-2 is the pathogen that caused the global COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. Promising progress has been made in developing vaccines and antiviral drugs. Antivirals medicines are necessary complements of vaccines for post-infection treatment. The main protease (Mpro) is an extremely important protease in the reproduction process of coronaviruses which cleaves pp1ab over more than 11 cleavage sites. In this work, two active main protease inhibitors were found via docking-based virtual screening and bioassay. The IC(50) of compound VS10 was 0.20 μM, and the IC(50) of compound VS12 was 1.89 μM. The finding in this work can be helpful to understand the interactions of main protease and inhibitors. The active candidates could be potential lead compounds for future drug design.