This team is cross checking whether any of the 20,000 drugs already approved as safe for humans can block proteins essential to the wuhan coronavirus that causes COVID-19:
Our chemists used a massive database to match the approved drugs and proteins they interact with to the proteins on our list. They found 10 candidate drugs last week. For example, one of the hits was a cancer drug called JQ1. While we cannot predict how this drug might affect the virus, it has a good chance of doing something. Through testing, we will know if that something helps patients.
Facing the threat of global border shutdowns, we immediately shipped boxes of these 10 drugs to two of the few labs in the world working with live coronavirus samples: at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and Mount Sinai in New York. By March 13, the drugs were being tested in cells to see if they prevent the virus from reproducing.
Our team will soon learn from our collaborators at Mt. Sinai and the Pasteur Institute whether any of these first 10 drugs work against SARS-CoV-2 infections. Meanwhile, the team has continued fishing with viral baits, finding hundreds of additional human proteins that the coronavirus co-opts. We will be publishing the results in the online repository BioRxiv soon.
The good news is that so far, our team has found 50 existing drugs that bind the human proteins we've identified. This large number makes me hopeful that we'll be able to find a drug to treat COVID-19. If we find an approved drug that even slows down the virus's progression, doctors should be able to start getting it to patients quickly and save lives
