Chemotherapy drug surpasses coronavirus remdesivir in lab experiments: study – fitness

A chemotherapy drug originally developed to treat cancer could potentially be reused to inhibit replication of the new coronavirus and treat Covid-19, according to a study based on computer simulations and laboratory experiments. The research, published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, combined several computational techniques that simulate drug-virus interactions from different and complementary perspectives. Using this hybrid approach, scientists at the Institutes of Advanced Technology in Shenzhen, China screened 1,906 existing drugs for their potential ability to inhibit coronavirus replication by targeting a viral protein called RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRP).

The researchers identified four promising drugs, which were then tested against the SARS-CoV-2 virus in laboratory experiments. They said two of the drugs, pralatrexate and azithromycin, were successful in inhibiting virus replication, and that other lab experiments showed that pralatrexate inhibited viral replication more strongly than remdesivir – a drug currently. used to treat certain Covid-19 patients.

Scientists say the results suggest that pralatrexate could potentially be reused to treat Covid-19. However, the researchers said that the chemotherapy drug can cause significant side effects and is used for people with terminal lymphoma, so they added that immediate use for Covid-19 patients is not is not guaranteed. But the research underscored the importance of the new screening strategy for identifying drugs that could be reused.

“We have demonstrated the value of our new hybrid approach which combines deep learning technologies with more traditional simulations of molecular dynamics,” said study author Haiping Zhang of the Institutes of Advanced Technology in Shenzhen.

Researchers are currently developing additional computational methods to generate new molecular structures that could be developed into new drugs to treat Covid-19.

(This story was posted from an agency feed with no text editing.)

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