Ebola drug candidates discovered by UM student

Two Ebola virus drug candidates discovered by University of Macau (UM) student Faraz Mohammadali Shaikh have been validated by the University of Oxford in the U.K.

Shaikh, a PhD student from the Faculty of Science and Technology at the UM, recently discovered two Ebola virus drug candidates. The discovery has been validated by collaborators from the University of Oxford through biological experiments, according to a statement from the UM.

Shaikh was awarded the Carl Storm International Diversity Fellowship, which sponsored him to attend the 2019 Computer-Aided Drug Design Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) and the 2019 Computer-Aided Drug Design Gordon Research Conference (GRC) in the United States to present his findings, in order to help the medical industry develop more anti-Ebola drugs.

The research study was conducted by Shaikh under the guidance of Assistant Professor Shirley Siu Weng In from the UM. Using hierarchical molecular docking techniques, Faraz computationally screened a traditional Chinese medicine-derived library of nearly 2.5 million compounds against the Ebola glycoprotein, from which he identified eight candidates with potential inhibitory effects on Ebola infectious activities.

Biological experiments were carried out later by collaborators from the University of Oxford, and eventually, two compounds were validated to show strong activity against viral entry. The groundbreaking discovery has been published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.