Novel antiviral drug significantly more potent against SARS-CoV-2

The antiviral drug plitidepsin is between 10 and 100 times* more effective against SARS-CoV-2, including the new UK variant, than the NHS approved** drug remdesivir, finds new preclinical research involving UCL scientists. As part of a coronavirus collaboration with US researchers, a UCL team was asked to test the efficacy of the drug plitidepsin on the newly identified UK variant mutant strain B. The UK arm of the study, published on the pre-print server bioRxiv , found plitidepsin was around 10 times more potent than remdesivir in vitro (in human epithelial cells) - at reducing B.1.1.7 infectivity. This UCL research mirrors the results of the larger arm of the study based in the US, which has been through peer-review, and was conducted by collaborators at the Quantitative Biosciences Institute (QBI), part of University of California San Francisco, and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York (ISMMS). For the US-led paper, published in Science , researchers screened numerous clinically approved drugs, in order to identify those with inhibitory activity against SARS-CoV-2. Specifically they were looking for 'host-directed therapies', those which target host (human) proteins, rather than virus proteins, which are usually targeted to inhibit infection. Plitidepsin, also known as Aplidin , is a novel drug approved by the Australian Regulatory Agency for the treatment of multiple myeloma, and is part of numerous other Phase II/III clinical cancer trials around the world.