Protein mapping points to 69 potential COVID-19 treatments
Leigh Krietsch Boerner · C&EN Global Enterprise · 2020
A team of scientists has found 69 drug candidates that might help treat COVID-19, the disease caused by infection with SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus. Forty-one of them are either already approved by the US Food and Drug Administration or currently in clinical trials for other uses and so might be more quickly available to patients if shown to be effective. Led by molecular biologist Nevan Krogan of the University of California, San Francisco, the team identified 332 proteins that SARS-CoV-2 proteins bind to and use to replicate inside the human body (bioRxiv 2020, DOI: 10.1101/2020.03.22.002386). This allowed the researchers to pinpoint compounds that might interfere with the virus’s ability to interact with cells. “If the viral protein is hijacking the host proteins, and then our drug inhibits that protein, then we will be denying the virus the ability to hijack that host protein,” says UCSF molecular pharmacologist Kevan Shokat, also