It is called remdesivir and is an antiviral capable of reducing the replication of some coronaviruses, preventing Mers in macaques or decreasing their severity. The hope is that it will also be useful against the Chinese coronavirus.
A new (potential) drug, active against many types of viruses. Here too there is hope for the fight against coronavirus that comes from China. It is not yet a medicine, but rather an experimental drug, but remdesivir, this is the name of the anti-viral, has proved capable of protecting some macaques from the infection of Mers-CoV, the coronavirus that causes Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (Mers ). Encouraging results for clinical trials of the drug also against the analogue Sars-CoV-2.
Mers is a respiratory infection that has caused around 2500 infections since the virus was discovered since 2012. At the moment there are very few cases reported, but the possibility of human-to-human transmission and the high lethality of the virus - about 35% of them - have fueled the search for specific treatments against the virus. The work on remdesivir published today on the pages of Pnas fits into this trend, and continues some already started that had demonstrated the effectiveness of the antiviral, both in vitro and in mice on different coronaviruses, and in macaques, for the ebola virus and the Nipah virus disease.
In the current study, carried out by researchers from the National Institutes of Health in collaboration with the company that is developing the drug (Gilead), scientists tested the prophylactic and therapeutic efficacy of the antiviral on some macaques infected with Mers-CoV. Analyzing overall health and lung injury, the researchers observed that when the drug was administered a day before the infection, the macaques showed no signs of respiratory disease or lung damage, and lower levels of viral replication. Some benefits were also observed for animals that had received the drug after infection with Mers-CoV, with less serious disease and injury than controls who had not received the drug, as well as lower virus levels.
What has been observed suggests - with all the limitations of research that is still somewhat preliminary in some respects - that the drug could have an open-minded and therapeutic role, especially if administered early. Both against Mers and against Covid-19, pneumonia caused by the Chinese coronvirus. "Our results, together with the inhibition of replication with the remdesivir of various coronaviruses in vitro and in vivo - the researchers wrote at the end of the paper - could indicate their usefulness against the new coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan, China." So much so that some clinical trials against Chinese coronavirus with remdesivir are already underway, as the clinicaltrial.gov database also shows.
