‘Antibiotics abound, but virus-fighting drugs are harder to come by. Fortunately, scientists are getting better at making and finding them...
‘The pandemic has sent scientists scrambling to find treatments. Heise [virologist Mark Heise of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill], for one, is testing a wide range of drugs—not just standard antivirals—against SARS-CoV-2 in lab dishes, as part of the Rapidly Emerging Antiviral Drug Discovery Initiative (READDI). The idea is that, because the virus depends on many processes in human cells, a variety of medications that act on human proteins might give doctors an edge by hurting the virus more than the patient. That throws the doors open to considering medications that were originally designed for cancer, psychosis, inflammatory conditions and autoimmune disease, to see if they might have a shot against Covid-19.
‘But the READDI collaborators—including academic centers, pharmaceutical companies and nongovernmental organizations—are aiming for more than a Covid-19 treatment. READDI hopes to identify and test potential medications for as-yet-unknown infections that may crop up in the future.
‘By getting early human safety testing done ahead of time, they’ll be ready to spring into action when those future outbreaks happen. As Heise says, “We don’t want to repeat what we’ve just been through.”
Read here (Scientific American, Feb 11, 2021)
