Control Strategies of Ebola Virus Disease in Bioinformatics Perspective

Ebola disease is an acute fever disease that is caused by infection of viruses within the genus Ebolavirus such as Zaire ebolavirus, Sudan ebolavirus, Bundibugyo ebolavirus, Taï Forest ebolavirus, and Reston ebolavirus. Almost all species cause disease in human, except Reston ebolavirus which is only known to cause disease in nonhuman primates. Ebola infection in human has similar initial symptoms with influenza or malaria which are marked with pyrexia, sore head, muscle or joint pain, weakness, vomiting, abdomen pain, as well as bleeding. The virus can spread by direct contact from human to human through various bodily fluids such as saliva, blood, stool, semen, breast milk, and tears. Ebola virus proteins comprise of non-structural proteins, nucleoprotein, matrix protein, and glycoproteins. Since its discovery in 1976, Ebola virus has become an epidemic in the African continent. The most extensive Ebola case in history was confirmed at the end of March 2016 with 11,325 deaths in West Africa. Unfortunately, there is no FDA-approved drug to treat this viral infection in human. Drug discovery and development for EVD is a complex process which requires a long time, many resources, and huge capital. Because of that, another approach has to apply in order to reduce all of the necessities. Bioinformatics studies through the Computer-Aided Drug Design (CADD) method can be employed to find the potential drug candidates at the preliminary stage of drug discovery. Our research group has successfully developed drug candidates to treat Ebola by using EBOV protein structure. Most of these drug candidates were obtained from some free online databases and were processed through molecular docking simulation. The drug candidates which was selected must comply with the requirements such as attaching to the binding sites of the protein, have energy binding value lower than standards, and exhibited preferable interaction with the protein. The screening process also involves pharmacokinetics analysis and toxicity prediction by using software to suppress possible failure when evaluated later in the wet laboratory. In this chapter, we describe the successful developed drug candidates from our laboratory to treat Ebola by using EBOV protein structure, such as VP24, VP35, VP40, nucleoprotein, and glycoprotein.