‘Despite dire warnings, a stockpile of ready compounds to fight viral pandemics was sorely lacking. Can drugmakers finally do the right thing?...
“What we will hopefully find”, he [Alejandro Chavez, a bioengineer and antiviral drug researcher at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City] says, “are inhibitors that work on, if you’re really lucky, an entire family.” That would make the best-case scenario a pan-coronavirus inhibitor. But a more reasonable goal might be developing a drug for a subset of coronaviruses, such as alphacoronaviruses, which currently cause non-lethal infections in humans, and having a different drug for betacoronaviruses, the group responsible for SARS, MERS, and COVID-19.
‘Once the viral lineage is identified, “the same principles of drug discovery apply”, says Marnix Van Loock, head of emerging pathogens at Johnson & Johnson’s global public-health unit in Beerse, Belgium. As he explains, researchers need to find ‘druggable pockets’ on the surface of essential enzymes that are conserved between related viruses and can be used to design active molecules.’
Read here (Nature, Apr 14, 2021)
