Remdesivir inhibits Porcine epidemic diarrhea virus infection in vitro

Zi-Xin Huang; Shu-Ting Zhou; Jing Wang; Zhi-Biao Yang; Zhe Wang

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e21468

Remdesivir inhibits Porcine epidemic diarrhea virus infection in vitro

Heliyon. 2023 Nov 2;9(11):e21468. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e21468. eCollection 2023 Nov.

Authors

Zi-Xin Huang^{1

2}, Shu-Ting Zhou^{1

2}, Jing Wang³, Zhi-Biao Yang^{1

2}, Zhe Wang^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Shanghai Collaborative Innovation Center of Agri-Seeds / School of Agriculture and Biology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China.
² Shanghai Key Laboratory of Veterinary Biotechnology, School of Agriculture and Biology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China.
³ Department of Preventive Veterinary Medicine, College of Veterinary Medicine, Northwest A&F University, Yang ling, Xianyang 712100, China.

Abstract

Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus (PEDV) is a highly contagious and pathogenic virus that causes symptoms such as diarrhea, vomiting, weight loss, and even death in piglets. Due to its high transmission rate, PEDV has resulted in significant global losses. Although some vaccines have been developed and utilized to prevent PEDV, their effectiveness is limited due to the virus's mutations. Therefore, it is imperative to investigate new strategies to combat PEDV. Remdesivir, a classic antiviral drug for coronaviruses, has been proven in our experiment to effectively suppress PEDV replication in Vero and LLC-PK1 cells. Additionally, the cell experiment demonstrated its direct inhibition of PEDV RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) enzyme activity. Molecular docking simulations were employed to predict the binding site of remdesivir and PEDV RdRp. Moreover, we observed that remdesivir does not impact the production of inflammatory factors and exhibits antagonistic effects with exogenous nucleosides. Furthermore, we conducted RNA-Seq analysis to investigate the global changes in transcriptome of infected cells treated with remdesivir. Overall, our findings indicate that remdesivir holds promise as a potential candidate for the treatment of PEDV infection.

Keywords: Porcine epidemic diarrhea virus; RNA-Seq; RdRp; Replication inhibition; remdesivir.