Scientists Identify 69 Drugs to Test Against the Coronavirus

Only well-run trials could establish whether chloroquine was safe and effective against the coronavirus, Dr. Fauci said.

On Wednesday, the World Health Organization announced it would begin a trial on chloroquine, among other drugs.

And on Sunday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York announced that the state had obtained large amount of chloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin to start its own drug trial.

Nevan Krogan, a biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who led the new study, warned that chloroquine might have many toxic side effects, because the drug appears to target many human cellular proteins.

“You need to be careful,” he said. “We need more data at every level.”

Dr. Krogan’s collaborators at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York and the Pasteur Institute in Paris have started testing 22 of the other compounds on the list against live coronavirus grown in their laboratories.

On Sunday night, they were still awaiting the first results.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/science/coronavirus-drugs-chloroquine.html