The COVID-19 outbreak has been curbed, but the SARS-CoV-2 virus continues to evolve rapidly. Public health officials fear a lethal mutation will soon render current drugs and treatments ineffective.

In a groundbreaking study published in Science Translational Medicine, researchers from Stanford University have introduced a potentially game-changing drug against the coronavirus. This drug, named ML2006a4, was crafted atom-by-atom and shows promise in its ability to bind to coronavirus particles, preventing their replication. Notably, it demonstrates a more durable and tighter binding than Paxlovid, the current gold standard in oral anti-coronavirus drugs. 

“At this point entering the fifth year of the pandemic, Paxlovid is our only really good drug against SARS-CoV-2, but it’s proven fairly easy for the virus to evolve resistance to it. As new waves of coronavirus keep crashing down, we need to have alternative drugs that are more tolerant of mutations and not as easy for the virus to defeat,” said Michael Lin, the senior author of the study, 

Lin is an associate professor at Stanford and was among the Stanford researchers whose work on the hepatitis C drug boceprevir served as the foundation for Pfizer’s Paxlovid. For this study, he worked with Michael Westberg, the lead author and assistant professor at Aarhus University in Denmark.

During their tests, they discovered that ML2006a4 was as effective as Paxlovid, but it proved more effective in protecting the rodents’ lungs and decreasing the test subjects’ overall virus load. Moreover, Lin said ML2006a4, unlike Paxlovid, may not require working with ritonavir, a drug that prohibits the liver from quickly processing the protease inhibitor called nirmatrelvir.

The team shared they are eyeing expanded preclinical testing for the compounds they developed and later on push with clinical trials in human patients.

“We’re very excited how far we’ve come and how successful our drug discovery has been on a shoestring budget. We hope to see this promising compound developed further to stay ready for what SARS-CoV-2 throws at us,” Lin added.

Read the full article here to learn more about the processes taken to develop the new anti-coronavirus drug.

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