New drug may be potent against the coronavirus | TheHill - The Hill

Researchers use a chemical compound originally found in a sea creature to stop the virus causing COVID-19 in lab experiments.

Researchers recently published in Science the results of preclinical experiments involving using plitidepsin to treat human and mouse cells infected with SARS-CoV-2.

The drug has been used in the past and was approved in Australia as a treatment for a type of cancer called multiple myeloma.

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The researchers focused on how the virus uses human cells to survive and reproduce.

“That research led us to a biologic pathway, the eukaryotic translation machinery, where inhibition of the pathway showed significant antiviral activity in cell culture,” says Nevan Krogan, director of UC San Francisco’s Quantitative Bioscience Institute and one of the study’s lead researchers.

When they tested plitidepsin in their experiments, they found that it was effective in human and mouse cell lines.

“This means that if plitidepsin is successful in the treatment of COVID-19, the SARS-CoV-2 virus will be unable to gain resistance against it through mutation, which is a major concern with the spread of the new U.K.

The next steps would be for the drug to go through clinical trials to test if it is effective in treating people with an active SARS-CoV-2 infection.