Search is moving on in the fight against coronavirus. Searchers from the Institut Pasteur de Lille are said to have found a way to create a therapy preventing the virus from replicating itself… The latter have issued a study this past September in the Angewandte Chimie Internationale Edition in English magazine a very encouraging analysis of a component of the virus enabling to stop it from replicating itself in the organism.
What was the analysis about? A nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy of the main protease of Covid called 3CLpro. The NMR enables scientists to study the tridimensional structure of the main protease of SARS-CoV-2 while giving tools enabling medicinal chemists to find small molecules to inhibit this very protease. And these molecules (non-covalent reversible inhibitors), scientists from the institute discovered one, called F01. It seems – according to the study released in the Angewandte Chimie – to have an antiviral impact on cells infected by Covid, and especially an action on the virus’s replication.
“We gave ourselves eighteen months to come to a real candidate medicine”, especially created against coronavirus pr. Benoit Deprez – head of the Institut Pasteur de Lille Research Unit – explains. But an already promising therapy – since in addition to limiting severe disease, anyway, it seems it can also cut the virus’s transmission through airways. Note these researches have all been financed by the region. As for the analysis, it has been released in free access for the entire world scientific community.
