“In two months, our effects have shown that the drug is effective at inhibiting viral replication in CELLS with SARS-CoV-2,” said Joanne Lemieux, professor of biochemistry at the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry.
“This medicine is very likely to be for human paints, so we are encouraged to make it an effective antiviral remedy for patients with COVID-19.”
The drug is a protease inhibitor that interferes with the virus’s ability to replicate, ending an infection. Proteases have many physical purposes and are not unusual targets of medications to treat everything from high blood pressure to cancer and HIV.
First studied through U of A chemist John Vederas and biochemist Michael James after the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003, the protease inhibitor evolved through veterinary researchers who demonstrated that it cures a deadly disease in cats.
Paintings to verify the drug of the guilty coronavirus coVID-19, a cooperative effort between 4 laboratories of the U of A, led by Lemieux, Vederas, biochemistry professor Howard Young and the founding director of the Li Ka Shing Institute of Virology, Lorne Tyrrell. Some of the experiments were conducted through Stanford’s Synchrotron Structural Molecular Biology Program.
Their findings were published in the journal Nature Communications after being first published on BioRxIV, a study website.
“There is a rule with COVID studies that all effects should be made public immediately,” Lemieux said, which is why they were published before being peer-reviewed.
He said interest in paintings was high, as the newspaper had been consulted thousands of times as soon as it was published.
Lemieux explained that Vederas synthesized the compounds and Tyrrell opposed them to the SARS-CoV-2 virus in human tubes and mobile lines. Young and Lemieux’s teams then revealed the crystalline design of the drug when it binds to the protein.
“We decided on the three-dimensional form of protease with the drug in the pocket of the active site, with the inhibition mechanism appearing,” he said. “This will allow us to expand even more effective drugs.”
Lemieux said it will continue to verify the modifications of the inhibitor to make the virus more compatible.
But he said the existing drug had enough antiviral action against SARS-CoV-2 to continue clinical trials.
“As a general rule, for a drug to enter clinical trials, it will have to be confirmed in the laboratory and then tested on animal models,” Lemieux said. “Because this drug has already been used to treat cats with coronavirus and is effective with little or no toxicity, it has already passed those steps and this allows us to move forward.”
“Because of the counterfeit knowledge that we and others have collected, we are conducting clinical trials for this drug as an antiviral for COVID-19.”