Thread by @DrEricDing

A NEW HOPE: 27x more effective than Remdesivir against #COVID19 in lab study –Aplidin is a drug derived from a marine sea squirt found only in waters off 🇪🇸 island of Ibiza. A cancer drug for multiple myeloma, it’s showing COVID success in lab studies. 🧵
jsonline.com/story/news/202…

2) International team of scientists identify new treatment for COVID-19 that appears to be far more effective than current drugs.
jsonline.com/story/news/202…

A related preprint says that tests have shown the drug is equally effective against #b117 variant too!

3) Aplidin, already approved in Australia for treating multiple myeloma, has been developed as a potential COVID-19 treatment by the Spanish drug company PharMar. 

The drug was identified as a potential treatment after scientists at UCSF tried an unconventional approach...

4) Instead of randomly testing vast libraries of existing drugs or targeting key proteins in the virus, the UCSF team focused on human proteins needed by the virus. The scientists then looked for existing drugs that would prevent #SARSCoV2 from hijacking those human proteins.

5) “This was data driven instead of just randomly screening drugs," stressed Nevan Krogan, one of three co-leaders of the new study in Science and director of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute at the University of California, San Francisco.

6) “Krogan said focusing on human, rather the viral, proteins, offered a powerful advantage in the fight against the new coronavirus.

➡️"If you target a human protein that the virus needs," he said, "the virus will **never mutate away** from being reliant on that human protein."

7) Aplidin, also known as Plitidepsin, has gone through a Phase II clinical trial against COVID-19 and is now awaiting the start of Phase III testing. It comes from sea squirts, marine creatures that look like plants and have tubular openings allowing them to draw water.

8) also to be clear— this is not some small minor study — it was published in SCIENCE!!! One of the top science journals in the world.
science.sciencemag.org/content/early/…

9) And the 27x greater potency of #Aplidin against Remdesivir claim against #SARSCoV2? It’s backed up by evidence in-vitro in the Science article itself!

10) in mice, It also found reduction of #sarscov2 viral replication by 2 orders of magnitude in lungs too.