Hemagglutinin-esterase cannot be considered as a candidate for designing drug against COVID-19.

ABSTRACT

We read with interest the article by Patel et al. on the identification of potential inhibitors of coronavirus hemagglutinin-esterase. The authors considered hemagglutinin-esterase as a glycoprotein of SARS-CoV-2 and selected hemagglutinin-esterase as a target to identify potential inhibitors using a combination of various computational approaches, and however, SARS-CoV-2 genome lacks hemagglutinin-esterase gene; thus, hemagglutinin-esterase does not exist in SARS-CoV-2 particle.