Working at a breakneck pace, a team of hundreds of scientists has identified 50 drugs that may be effective treatments for people infected with the coronavirus.
Many scientists are seeking drugs that attack the virus itself. But the Quantitative Biosciences Institute Coronavirus Research Group, based at the University of California, San Francisco, is testing an unusual new approach.
The researchers are looking for drugs that shield proteins in our own cells that the coronavirus depends on to thrive and reproduce.
Many of the candidate drugs are already approved to treat diseases, such as cancer, that would seem to have nothing to do with Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus.
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Scientists at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and at the Pasteur Institute in Paris have already begun to test the drugs against the coronavirus growing in their labs. The far-flung research group is preparing to release its findings at the end of the week.
There is no antiviral drug proven to be effective against the virus. When people get infected, the best that doctors can offer is supportive care — the patient is getting enough oxygen, managing fever and using a ventilator to push air into the lungs, if needed — to give the immune system time to fight the infection.
If the research effort succeeds, it will be a significant scientific achievement: an antiviral identified in just months to treat a virus that no one knew existed until January.
“I’m really impressed at the speed and the scale at which they’re moving,” said John Young, the global head of infectious diseases at Roche Pharma Research and Early Development, which is collaborating on some of the work.
“We think this approach has real potential,” he said.
Some researchers at the Q.B.I. began studying the coronavirus in January. But last month, the threat became more imminent: A woman in California was found to be infected although she had not recently traveled outside the country.
That finding suggested that the virus was already circulating in the community.
“I got to the lab and said we’ve got to drop everything else,” recalled Nevan Krogan, director of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute. “Everybody has got to work around the clock on this.”
Source: The New York Times
