An anti-viral produced by a Spanish laboratory reduces covid load by 99%

BarcelonaThe magazine Science has published this Tuesday the discovery of the important effects against covid of an antiviral which lowers its coronavirus's viral load by 99%. It is plitidepsin, produced by Madrid-based pharmaceutical company PharmaMar. This antiviral attacks the host protein eEF1A. According to the researchers, it is the most powerful compound yet found against SARS-CoV-2, and could be tested in clinical trials.

This publication is the result of collaboration between PharmaMar and the laboratories of Kris White, Adolfo García-Sastre and Thomas Zwaka, in the Departments of Microbiology and Cellular, Regenerative and Developmental Biology at the Icahn School of Medicine; Kevan Shokat and Nevan Krogan, at the Institute of Quantitative Biosciences at the University of California, San Francisco; and Marco Vignuzzi at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. The article reports that "the antiviral activity of plitidepsin against SARS-CoV-2 occurs by inhibiting the known target eEF1A" and adds that plitidepsin in vitro has demonstrated strong antiviral potency, compared to other SARS-CoV-2 antivirals, with limited toxicity.

In two different animal models of SARS-CoV-2 infection, the trial demonstrated a reduction in viral replication, leading to a 99% decrease in viral loads in the lung of the plitidepsin-treated animals. The paper also states that, although toxicity is a concern in any antiviral targeting a human cell protein, the safety profile of plitidepsin is well established in humans, and that the highly tolerated doses of plitidepsin used in the covid-19 clinical trial are significantly lower than those used in these experiments. The publication concludes that plitidepsin acts by blocking the protein eEF1A, present in human cells, and is used by SARS-CoV-2 to reproduce and infect other cells. This mechanism culminates in antiviral efficacy in vivo.

"We believe that our data and the initial positive results from PharmaMar's clinical trial suggest that plitidepsin should be seriously considered for further clinical trials for the treatment of covid-19," the researchers say. This group of experts, now known as QBI Coronavirus Research Group (QCRG), was the first to comprehensively map the covid-19 genome and discover that the virus interacts with 332 proteins in human cells.