AUTHOR=Teodori Laura , Sestili Piero , Madiai Valeria , Coppari Sofia , Fraternale Daniele , Rocchi Marco Bruno Luigi , Ramakrishna Seeram , Albertini Maria Cristina 

TITLE=MicroRNAs Bioinformatics Analyses Identifying HDAC Pathway as a Putative Target for Existing Anti‐COVID‐19 Therapeutics

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Pharmacology

VOLUME=Volume 11 - 2020

YEAR=2020

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pharmacology/articles/10.3389/fphar.2020.582003

DOI=10.3389/fphar.2020.582003

ISSN=1663-9812

ABSTRACT=Over 240.000 SARS-COV-2 positive cases have been confirmed in Italy as June 2020, with the number of deaths exceeding 34 thousand, making Italy between major Countries for world COVID-19 deaths. Such enormous occurrence of infected and dead people raises the urgent demand of effective fast available treatments to control and diminish this pandemic. Discovering the cellular/molecular mechanisms of SARS-COV-2 pathogenicity is of paramount importance to understand how the infection becomes a disease and for therapeutically approaching it. From literature data, through a bioinformatics approach, an in silico analysis was performed, to predict the putative virus targets and evidence the already available therapeutics. Literature experimental results identified angiotensin-converting enzyme ACE and Spike proteins particularly involved in COVID-19. We thus investigate on the signaling pathways modulated by the two proteins through query miRNet, the platform linking miRNAs, targets and functions. We predicted microRNAs (miRs), miR-335-5p and miR-26b-5p, as being modulated by Spike and ACE together with deacetylate histones pathway HDAC. Our results matched with the available clinical data. We hypothesize the current and EMA-approved, SARS-COV-2 off-label, HDAC inhibitors (HDACis) drugs may be repurposed to limit or block host-virus interactions. A ranked list of compounds is given that can be tested.