New crown research: an antiparasitic drug may prevent lung cell fusion

Since the development of the new crown epidemic, in addition to vaccines, some scientific teams around the world are still working on finding antiviral drugs.

On the evening of April 7, local time, the top international academic journal Nature published an online publication in the form of "Accelerated Article Preview" by King’s College London, Imperial College London, and University of Trieste, Italy.

Studies have found that a drug commonly used to treat tapeworm infections, Niclosamide, may help prevent the formation of atypical fusion cells in the lungs of COVID-19 patients.

In this study, Giacca and colleagues studied postmortem samples of the lungs of 41 patients who died of COVID-19 between March and May 2020.

Studies believe that the production of these syncytia is due to the activation of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (S protein) at the cell membrane level.

Based on these observations, the research team screened more than 3,000 clinically approved drugs to find out which molecules can inhibit the cell fusion induced by this spike protein.

The study screened out 83 drugs and conducted further experiments on 43 molecules that can prevent virus replication and cell damage.

According to the study, niclosamide can inhibit virus replication in the experiment, weaken the calcium oscillation of cells expressing S protein, inhibit the activity of TMEM16F, and prevent the formation of syncytia induced by S protein.

The research team pointed out that drugs known to inhibit other members of the TMEM16 protein family have also performed well in these experiments, or can be further studied for the treatment of COVID-19.

Link to the paper: https://nature.