A Large-scale Drug Repositioning Survey for SARS-CoV-2 Antivirals

Laura Riva, Shuofeng Yuan, Xin Yin, Laura Martin-Sancho, Naoko Matsunaga, Sebastian Burgstaller-Muehlbacher, Lars Pache, Paul P. De Jesus, Mitchell V. Hull, Max Chang, Jasper Fuk-Woo Chan, Jianli Cao, Vincent Kwok-Man Poon, Kristina Herbert, Tu-Trinh Nguyen, Yuan Pu, Courtney Nguyen, Andrey Rubanov, Luis Martinez-Sobrido, Wen-Chun Liu, Lisa Miorin, Kris M. White, Jeffrey R. Johnson, Christopher Benner, Ren Sun, Peter G. Schultz, Andrew Su, Adolfo Garcia-Sastre, Arnab K. Chatterjee, Kwok-Yung Yuen, Sumit K. Chanda

• Sumit Chanda’s lab in the Immunity and Pathogenesis Program at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute committed to finding a drug to fight coronavirus
• The project is the largest screening of drugs against the virus to have publicly produced results to date and is expected to begin clinical trials soon
• The development of a vaccine could require at least 12-18 months, so the team is aims to identify therapeutics that can be repurposed as SARS-CoV-2 antivirals
• Cultured coronavirus provided by University of Hong Kong’s Yuen Kwok-yung in collaboration with the project
• Tests conducted by 31 research in institutions across the world found that 30 out of 12,000 drugs seemed to stop the virus from destroying human cells
• Of the 30 successful drugs, six were characterized for cellular dose-activity relationships, and showed effective concentrations likely to be commensurate with therapeutic doses in patients

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