Chemotherapy drug originally developed to treat lymphoma outperforms Remdesivir against COVID
Beijing: A chemotherapy medication originally developed to treat lymphoma has outperformed the popular remdesivir drug against SARS-CoV-2 in lab settings, and could potentially be repurposed to treat Covid-19, say researchers.
A novel computational drug screening strategy combined with lab experiments suggest that pralatrexate drug is a promising candidate for Covid-19 patients.
The novel screening approach identified four promising drugs, which were then tested against SARS-CoV-2 in lab experiments.
Two of the drugs, pralatrexate and azithromycin, successfully inhibited replication of the virus.
Further lab experiments showed that pralatrexate more strongly inhibited viral replication than did remdesivir, a drug that is currently used to treat some Covid-19 patients, said Haiping Zhang of the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology in Shenzhen, China.
Zhanh and team screened 1,906 existing drugs for their potential ability to inhibit replication of SARS-CoV-2 by targeting a viral protein called RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRP).
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