Broad-Spectrum Inhibitors of Future Emerging Viruses

Emerging zoonotic viruses will continue to pose a risk to human populations for the foreseeable future. RNA viruses causing human outbreaks/epidemics/pandemics over the past seven decades have come from six plus strand RNA virus families and ten minus strand virus families (Fig. 1). Examples of specific virus species and their families include SARS coronavirus, Ebola filovirus, Chikungunya toga virus, Lassa fever arenavirus, Zika flavivirus, Sin nombre bunya virus, and Nipah paramyxovirus. The flavivirus family contains more than 100 arthropod-borne virus (arbovirus) species including Dengue (DENV), Zika (ZIKV), West Nile(WNV), Japanese encephalitis (JEV), Yellow fever (YFV), St. Louis encephalitis (SLEV), Powassan (POWV), and Omsk hemorrhagic fever viruses (OHFV). The initial goal of our Discovery project was to target the flaviviruses for identifying broad-spectrum antiviral compounds for use against constellations of known, as yet unknown viruses, as well as viruses that will arise in the future through evolution.