Ebola drug can infiltrate, trick coronavirus from the inside, Alberta study suggests

An old ebola drug being tested as a treatment for COVID-19 is capable of tricking the virus responsible for the deadly respiratory disease, a new University of Alberta study suggests.

The drug remdesivir is capable of halting the coronavirus from replicating, according to new research published Monday in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

The study, led by Matthias Gtte, chair of medical microbiology and immunology at U of A, demonstrates how the antiviral drug disrupts the virus by attacking enzymes known as polymerases.

When viruses infect our body, they hijack our cells to replicate themselves, making more viruses that can go on to infect other cells or people,Gttesaid in a news release Monday.

Remdesivir takes advantage of the coronavirus'natural life cycle, infiltrating the virus'genome and effectively shuttingdown itsability to make copies of itself, hesaid.

Replication of the virus relies on thepolymerases, enzymes which synthesize the virus' genome by assemblingsequences of RNA molecules. Remdesivir inhibits this process bymasquerading as a part of the virus itself and damaging it from the inside, Gttesaid.

The drug has proven a "very potent inhibitor," he said.

"If you target the polymerase, the virus cannot spread, so it's a very logical target for treatment," Gtte said.

"These coronavirus polymerases are sloppy and they get fooled, so the inhibitor gets incorporated many times and the virus can no longer replicate."

'Avery potent inhibitor'

The drug remdesivir has already been used intravenously to treat thousands of COVID-19 patients on a compassionate basis during the escalating pandemic. Clinical trial studies involving hundreds of patients around the globe began in early March.

And while the study supports the need for clinical study, results obtained in the lab cannot predict how the drug will work on people,Gtte said.

Ongoing clinical trials will be the true test, Gtte said. Those results can be expected as early as April or May.

American biotechnology company Gilead Sciences developed the drug remdesivir as a response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, where it was tested in a clinical trial.

Results showed the drug was not particularly effectiveagainst Ebola, but testing on monkeys infected with MERS the Middle East respiratory syndrome suggested the drug could be effective against coronaviruses.

A previous study by Gtte and his team, published in February, demonstrated that the drug waseffective against MERS, a related coronavirus.

"We were optimistic that we would see the same results against the SARS-CoV-2 virus,"Gtte said.SARS-CoV-2 virus is the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

"We obtained almost identical results as we reported previously with MERS, so we see that remdesivir is a very potent inhibitor for coronavirus polymerases."

Last month, Gilead Sciences announced two clinical studies to evaluate the safety and efficacy of remdesivir in about 1,000 adults diagnosed with COVID-19.

The company said the randomized studies will assess patients across Asia and in other countries where COVID-19 has been diagnosed in higher numbers.

Gtteis optimistic the ongoing global effort to find effective treatments for COVID-19 will be successful.

"We are desperate, but we still have to keep the bar high for anything that we put into clinical trials," Gtte said.

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