Why scientists are racing against resistance to develop more COVID antivirals
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“These are our first-generation antivirals against coronaviruses,” says Sara Cherry, an immunologist at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Our experience with antivirals against other diseases, like hepatitis C and HIV, proves that “we can do better and better over time”, she adds.
It’s too soon to tell whether SARS-CoV-2 is likely to develop any resistance to these first-generation antivirals, says Tim Sheahan, a coronavirologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Although its sky-high rate of replication is a breeding ground for mutations, he says, the virus also causes acute infections that offer relatively little time for resistance-causing mutations to accumulate.
Other antiviral drug candidates are slowly working their way through the clinical-trial pipeline, says Carl Dieffenbach, director of the division of AIDS at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases . He says that one promising candidate is a protease inhibitor, developed by Shionogi & Company, based in Osaka, Japan, and Hokkaido University in Japan, that is currently in phase II/III clinical trials in Asia.
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