The WHO says there are no proven effective therapeutics
to be had for the new coronavirus.
Efforts are focused on detection and containment.
A vaccine is still at least 12 to 18 months away.
As the coronavirus pandemic escalates knowing we have such
a long wait until we can immunise can be pretty scary.
The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is a new virus and attacks cells in a new way so
we need a new drug to tackle it.
That said, there might already be a drug ready to use,
we just don't know it yet.
Using pre-approved drugs is the best strategy in the short term to help people
as others develop maybe more sophisticated targeted approaches,
say with a vaccine, or with drugs that target the virus.
But that could take months, if not years.
Professor Nevan Krogan works with an international team of scientists
that have identified pre-existing drugs with the potential to fight the coronavirus.
What we've noticed here is that this virus, in a very interesting way, is coming in and
essentially hijacking all the major biological processes in the cell, in a very fascinating way.
So it's getting its fingers in pretty much all the major machinery in our cells.
So the virus needs our cells and our genes and proteins, in order to live and replicate
and infect ourselves.
So the question is, what are those proteins?
So we generated this map, this blueprint where
we're essentially, looking for all the human proteins connected to virus proteins.
We identified 332 of these human proteins, through this study.
And predicted drugs, or compounds
that would come and bind to and inhibit these human proteins.
So of the 69 that we predicted to bind at least one of these 332 proteins, 27 of which
are FDA-approved drugs and the rest are in clinical trials, or being looked at pre-clinically.
The logic here is if we do get a hit on one of these drugs we can go and look at one of
these drugs in more detail and then see what other drugs, or compounds are similar to it.
So we can expand our search space, based on this initial screen at the end of the day.
Which will give us hopefully a higher likelihood of success.
Give us a sense of why it's easier to use an old drug?
I think on average it takes eight, nine years to get a drug into a person and a big reason
for that length of time is that you have to go through toxicity trials.
But if you focus on drugs, or compounds, that have already passed that barrier. You can
more quickly expedite a particular drug, or compound, into a person to target this virus.
And a lot of times that's not done, this drug repurposing.
One of the reasons is, financially related.
Companies have patents for specific compounds, or drugs and if another company
finds that, oh, this drug could be used for another disease. Well the original company
will get all the financial benefit from that.
So people don't look at those in that way that much.
But of course now everybody just wants to solve this particular problem.
And I would say one of the classic examples of drug repurposing is Viagra.
It was initially used to treat heart pain
and then it was realized there were other beneficial effects associated with it.
So we'd been thinking about this for some time.
and obviously now, with this sense of urgency, it's really allowed us to expedite
this particular vision and test it.