ATLANTA — Georgia State University researchers report potential progress in identifying a medicine that can help people who are infected with COVID-19, by reducing symptoms, or even getting rid of the virus altogether.
The research team, led by Dr. Mukesh Kumar, said the drug - in lab tests- attacks and kills coronavirus that has infected human cells.
“So when we treat the cells with this drug,” Dr. Kumar said Wednesday, “the virus… completely goes away. And all the inflammation that we see with the untreated cell also goes away. So that’s very significant.”
Kumar and his team just shared their findings online, prior to routine peer review and publication in a medical journal, so researchers world wide can see the preliminary research right away.
What Kumar’s team reports is that a drug called “Auranofin,” which is already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat rheumatoid arthritis, can also, in lab tests, kill coronavirus that has infected a human cell.
“If you do not treat that [infected] cell,”Kumar said, “eventually there will be so much virus duplication that it will kill that cell. So eventually, after a few hours, you will not have any cells. The virus will just kill everything. But when you treat it with this drug, you see that all the cells are still there, they are healthy."
"There’s no virus after a few hours," he said. "There’s no other stress to that cell, the cell looks very healthy…. So it protects you, both from the virus, as well as the lung injury.”
The Georgia State University team is among dozens of research teams across the country conducting experiments with many, existing FDA-approved drugs, to see if any of them can be repurposed and quickly approved- to treat COVID-19 patients, as well.
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“And the good thing about that is because there’s previous data with existing medication, you’re not reinventing the wheel, it shouldn’t take as long" to get FDA approval for use in treating COVID-19 patients, said 11Alive Medical Correspondent Dr. Sujatha Reddy. "Some of the drugs that are really showing promise are the ones like at Georgia State, and I’m quite hopeful that one of these is really going to help us conquer this virus.”
The goal is to get a medicine on the market some time this year, to treat COVID-19 patients, while researchers continue trying to develop a vaccine that would prevent infection in the first place.
CORONAVIRUS