Repurposed Hepatitis C Drugs for COVID-19 Treatment Could Break Life Cycle of Coronavirus

A team of researchers have identified antiviral drugs used to treat hepatitis C that are protease inhibitors and could be repurposed for use as treatment for COVID-19.

Researchers from the University of Washington (UW) Medicine (Seattle, Wash., USA) examined 6,800 known drugs with a history of safe use in humans that could possibly break the life cycle of the coronavirus by blocking an important protein called the main protease. The team singled out boceprevir and narlaprevir, protease inhibitors developed by Merck & Co. that have been superceded by more effective hepatitis C treatments.

The researchers believe that if these drugs prove effective against the novel coronavirus in clinical trials, they can be used as part of a combination therapy to adopt more than one line of attack against the virus. According to the researchers, finding potent treatments among approved drugs offers an advantage as they “can be advanced rapidly to clinical trials without extensive multi-year preclinical development efforts.”

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