Coronavirus Treatment: Hundreds of Scientists Scramble to Find One
Dr. Shokat and his colleagues have found 50 promising candidates. The protein BRD2, for example, can be targeted by a drug called JQ1. Researchers originally discovered JQ1 as a potential treatment for several types of cancer.
On Thursday, Dr. Shokat and his colleagues filled a box with the first 10 drugs on the list and shipped them overnight to New York to be tested against the living coronavirus.
The drugs arrived at the lab of Adolfo Garcia-Sastre, director of the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital. Dr. Garcia-Sastre recently began growing the coronavirus in monkey cells.
Over the weekend, the team at the institute began treating infected cells with the drugs to see if any stop the viruses. “We have started experiments, but it will take us a week to get the first data here,” Dr. Garcia-Sastre said on Tuesday.
The researchers in San Francisco also sent the batch of drugs to the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where investigators also have begun testing them against coronaviruses.
If promising drugs are found, investigators plan to try them in an animal infected with the coronavirus — perhaps ferrets, because they’re known to get SARS, an illness closely related to Covid-19.
Even if some of these drugs are effective treatments, scientists will still need to make sure they are safe for treating Covid-19. It may turn out, for example, that the dose needed to clear the virus from the body might also lead to dangerous side effects.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/science/coronavirus-treatment.html