Effective drugs against Covid-19 could already be under our eyes: we must know how to recognize them. This is what researchers at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California tried to do, by examining a database of over 12 thousand drugs already existing, approved or in development against various diseases: they were thus able to find 13 active ingredients that in the first laboratory tests, on human cells and animal models, have shown to be effective against the SarsCoV2 virus, especially when used in “cocktails”.
Antiviral drugs
The study, which could accelerate their path to human clinical trials, is published in the journal Nature Communications. “Although there are now effective vaccines against Covid-19 – explains Peter Schultz, president and CEO of the Scripps Research Institute – we still do not have highly effective antiviral drugs that can prevent the infection or stop its progression”.
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An archive of 12 thousand active ingredients
Already at the beginning of the pandemic, however, the Californian experts had realized that they had a powerful tool to accelerate research: it is the ReFRAME database, the largest of its kind in the world, which they had created in 2018 with the support of Bill’s Foundation. and Melinda Gates to identify among the drugs already available those most promising against HIV, tuberculosis and some “forgotten” tropical diseases. The 12 thousand active ingredients contained in the archive were therefore tested on two types of human cells infected with SarsCoV2: from a first skimming, 90 of them with antiviral activity emerged.
The most promising are 13 products that can be administered orally: four (halofantrine, nelfinavir, simeprevir and manidipine) have already been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), while the other nine are in the experimental phase.
The effective combination
Among the compounds capable of blocking the replication of the coronavirus, as many as 19 have shown that they can act in combination with the remdesivir antiviral already approved against Covid-19: two in particular have demonstrated a synergistic action that enhances the effects of remdesivir. “The results of the tests on cells and animal models are very promising,” says Schultz. “We have already identified existing drugs that look very promising and are leveraging this knowledge to develop optimized antivirals that are more effective against SarsCoV2, drug resistant variants and strains, as well as other coronaviruses that already exist or may emerge in the future. “.