[ad_1]
A UCSF research team has landed on a potentially breakthrough treatment for COVID-19, despite it being an anti-cancer drug made by a Spanish company that is not yet approved for use in the United States. United.
The drug is called Aplidin (generic name: plitidepsin), and it is a compound originally derived from that found in a bizarre sea creature found near Ibiza called Albicans ecology. As the team explains in a new report from the journal Science, plitidepsin has been shown to significantly inhibit the replication of SARS CoV-2, aka the coronavirus, and may in fact be 30 times more effective as an antiviral treatment than remdesivir, which has been used on an emergency basis in clinical patients since last winter.
The team that discovered the new treatment was led by UCSF systems biologist Nevan Krogan, and it appears to be potentially the biggest success of a project that began last February to isolate existing drugs and compounds that could work as antiviral treatments. As we reported last May, Krogan’s team at UCSF’s Quantitative Biosciences Institute ditched everything they were working on last winter to focus on COVID-19, and by April they had identified 10 existing drugs that showed promise for treating the new disease.
Scientists in San Francisco and other teams around the world participating in the same effort have discovered two human proteins that appeared to be essential in the fight to prevent the coronavirus from replicating inside people, Sigma R1 and Sigma R2, and their medication. research initially focused on the latter. Aplidin works on the human protein known as eEF1A, and since it focuses on the human part of the equation and not the virus, it should hopefully remain effective when the virus mutates.
And the project highlights something scientists have long emphasized about the importance of maintaining biodiversity in the world’s oceans and elsewhere. The marine invertebrate from which this compound is derived is an ascidian or sea spray that looks “a bit like a disembodied brain,” as the Chronicle explains. The drug is actually owned by a Spanish company founded by a diver, Pharma Mar, and it has been approved in Australia for the treatment of blood cancer called multiple myeloma. It has also been used in the EU as a treatment for lymphoblastic leukemia.
The drug is in phase 2 clinical trials in Spain, where it was tested on 45 critically ill COVID patients. Based on data from the first 27 of those patients, the drug dramatically reduced time spent in hospital, with 81% returning home after 15 days, compared to a typical rate of less than 50%. And according to another article, Aplidin also appears to be effective against the UK variant of the virus.
“We need new weapons in the arsenal,” Krogan told the Chronicle. “This is by far the best thing we have seen.” Krogan says the drug research team was also led by virus expert Adolfo García-Sastre, based at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.
UCSF infectious disease expert Dr Peter Chin-Hong says if drug emerges from a phase 3 trial that is still in good condition, it will likely be part of a ‘cocktail’ of therapies for COVID . Doctors across the country are already treating patients with a cocktail of remdesivir and the steroid dexamethasone, and in Australia Aplidin is used in combination with dexamethasone to treat multiple myeloma.
Aplidin is yet to undergo larger Phase 3 clinical trials, said to take place in Spain and the U.S. And it remains to be seen how long it could take – if it turns out to be as effective as the first ones. trials suggest so – before the the drug became widely available here.
Top image: an image of the sea squirt Albicans ecology found in the Balearic Islands, from which the synthetic drug Aplidin is derived. Photo via Pharma Mar
[ad_2]
Source link