Thrilled to share our work on #covid19 #drugrepositioning, one of the first computational work with experimental validation. Though we need to further troubleshoot the cytotoxicity, since we started in late Jan, cannot wait to share what we have learned.
biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
1. Some anti-cancer drugs may be effective, but in general, they are toxic. may not appropriate for weak patients.
2. Anti-parasite drugs like #ivermectin, #niclosamide showed nice in vitro activity, but they are not soluble, challenging to deliver into the infected cells.
3. #choloquine seems working in our setting, yet at pretty high dose
4. The probability of existing drugs to bind to the new virus proteins might be low. Thinking about we often have to screen millions of compounds to find a lead for one target, but now we only have a few thousand drugs to screen
5. If we choose the drug that is going to modulate the immune system or any process outside of the host cells, we may not want to test it in vitro, but in vivo models are not immediately available.
6. Understanding the dynamic is very important, from the entry to replication; meaning when to add the drug and how to define the readout are critical
7. The open datasets made our work possible, really appreciate that. So sad we don’t have too many for virus research and many virology labs are short of funding to hire scientists to do such impactful work.
I'd like to thank my team for working day and night in the past three months and the support from @msuresearch
