The news about remdesivir, the investigational anti-viral drug that has shown early promise in the fight against COVID-19, keeps getting better.
This week researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Gilead Sciences reported that remdesivir potently inhibited SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, in human lung cell cultures and that it improved lung function in mice infected with the virus.
These preclinical findings help explain the clinical effect the drug has had in treating COVID-19 patients. Remdesivir has been given to patients hospitalized with COVID-19 on a compassionate use basis since late January and through clinical trials since February.
In April, a preliminary report from the multicenter Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial (which included VUMC) suggested that patients who received the drug recovered more quickly.
“All of the results with remdesivir have been very encouraging, even more so than we would have hoped, but it is still investigational, so it was important to directly demonstrate its activity against SARS-CoV-2 in the lab and in an animal model of disease,” said VUMC’s Andrea Pruijssers, PhD.
Pruijssers, research assistant professor of Pediatrics at VUMC and lead antiviral scientist in the laboratory of Mark Denison, MD, is the paper’s co-corresponding author with Timothy Sheahan, PhD, assistant professor of Epidemiology at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Denison, the E.C. Stahlman Professor of Pediatrics at VUMC, directs the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases. He and Ralph Baric, PhD, the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Epidemiology at UNC-Chapel Hill, and colleagues have been studying remdesivir since 2014.
They were the first to perform detailed studies to demonstrate that the drug, which was developed by Gilead Sciences to combat hepatitis C and respiratory syncytial virus, and later the Ebola virus, also showed broad and highly potent activity against coronaviruses in laboratory tests.
The current findings, reported this week in the journal Cell Reports, provide “the first rigorous demonstration of potent inhibition of SARS-CoV-2 in continuous and primary human lung cultures.” The study is also the first to suggest that remdesivir can block the virus in a mouse model.
