Is Fostamatinib a possible drug for COVID-19? – A computational study Sovan Saha 1, + , Anup Kumar Halder 2, + , Soumyendu Sekhar Bandyopadhyay 2 , Piyali Chatterjee 3 , Mita Nasipuri 2 , and Subhadip Basu 2,* 1 Dr. Sudhir Chandra Sur Degree Engineering College, Computer Science and Engineering, Kolkata, 700074, India 2 Jadavpur University, Computer Science and Engineering, Kolkata, 700032, India 3 Netaji Subhash Engineering College, Computer Science and Engineering, Kolkata, 700152, India * subhadip.basu@jadavpuruniversity.in + Equal Contribution, both shared 1 st authorship ABSTRACT COVID-19 has turned out to be a global pandemic within a very short period since its first origin in China in December 2019. With the gradual increase in the mortality rate all over the world, there is an urgent need for an effectual drug. Though no clinically approved vaccine or drug is available until now but scientists are trying hard to identify potential antivirals to this new coronavirus. Several drugs like hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir, azithromycin etc. are put under evaluation in more than 300 clinical trials for the treatment of COVID-19. Few of them already show encouraging results. The main agent of disease progression of COVID-19 is SARS-CoV2/nCoV, which is believed to have ~89% genetic resemblance with SARS- CoV, a coronavirus responsible for the massive outbreak in 2003. With this hypothesis, a recently developed in silico Human-nCoV network and potential COVID-19 spreader proteins, have been derived from the Human-SARS-CoV protein interactions using SIS model and fuzzy thresholding, followed by a potential FDA drugs target based validation. We then perform a two-way analysis to identify the potential drug targets of COVID-19. In the first analysis, we identify the complete list of FDA drugs for the 37 level 1 and 4948 level 2 spreader proteins in this network followed by the application of a consensus strategy. In the second analysis, the same consensus strategy is applied but on a curated overlapping set of key genes identified from COVID-19 symptoms, risk factors and clinical outcome. The applied consensus strategy in both the analysis reveals that Fostamatinib, a FDA approved drug, has the highest drug consensus score both in level 1 and level 2. Further analysis reveals that Fostamatinib also targets CYP3A4, a level 2 spreader protein and the most common target for most of the potential COVID-19 drugs. A subsequent docking study also reveals that Fostamatinib has also the highest docking score with respect to 6LU7, the crystal structure of COVID-19 main protease in complex with an inhibitor N3, in comparison to other potential drugs like hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir, favipiravir and darunavir. Our computational study suggests that Fostamatinib may also be considered as one of the potential candidates for further clinical trials in pursuit to counter the spread of COVID-19. Introduction The world has witnessed several severe epidemics like Spanish flu, ebola, cholera etc. Now we are in the front of the most life threatening viral outburst with COVID-19. The feature which makes this new coronavirus, nCoV, unique is its quick ability to transmit through respiratory droplets on coming in direct contact or neighborhood of any infected COVID patient 1 . It is considered to be one of the genera of Betacoronavirus which comes under the family of Coronaviridae. It is created by the assimilation of accessory, non-structural and structural proteins 2 . According to the World Health Organization (WHO) coronavirus disease dashboard 3 , 3,679,499 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 254,199 deaths have been reported as of 6:32pm CEST, 7 May 2020. Many treatments of antiviral drugs are considered and implemented to terminate COVID-19 based on the prior knowledge of major outbreaks of ebola, cholera etc. Moreover, along with these trial and error methods, an organized assessment of the drug chloroquine on nCoV has emerged 4 . But application of chloroquine on COVID-19 is contentious till date since these information have not been generated directly from the registered clinical trials in progress as reported by Zhang et al 5 . Recently, a literature survey 6 is implemented by a refined search in various online repositories to enfold various drug related COVID-19 research articles during the onset of this pandemic i.e. starting from January 1 and ending in March 25, 2020. Databases like Google Scholar, Science Direct, and PubMed etc. are marked as search strings for keywords like vaccine, anti-malaria drugs, treatment for COVID-19, traditional Chinese Medicine for COVID-19, anti-viral drugs. Almost 22 articles 6 have been filtered out based on the screening