As with COVID-19, future viral outbreaks will have a long time to spread before a vaccine is available. A new approach developed at NTNU can save lives and avoid the need to shut down society.
After two years of severe restrictions, everyone is eager to end the coronavirus pandemic. It’s tempting to think that COVID-19 is history, but coronavirus and other viruses will regularly resurface.
What will we do the next time we have a major outbreak?
A research team from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) has been hard at work for the past six months to find the answer to this question.
Many patients treated with malaria drugs died
During the coronavirus outbreak, many people thought malaria medicine might work. It took time to show that it was not effective and many patients died. Our solution can immediately determine which drug will or will not work.”
Denis Kainov, professor of medicine at NTNU
The solution is simply to reuse and redesign active ingredients that are currently used against various diseases such as cancer or HIV.
Researchers have analyzed more than 11,000 active ingredients to find the medicinal blend that has the greatest potential to work. The researchers incorporated information about the active ingredients into a digital system and created an algorithm that can select the best ones.
The digital system is openly available online. The solution can save millions of euros, more lives and help us avoid social closures.
But first a little background on what we’re really up against.
Viruses have a big head start
“We don’t have drugs for 200 viral diseases that can spread in humans,” says Kainov.
In other words, we don’t have any medicine that can stop viruses from multiplying when they start to spread. It is not possible to develop vaccines for a virus that has not yet spread in humans, since viruses constantly mutate.
As with COVID-19, future outbreaks will have a long time to spread before a vaccine is available.
This is where the NTNU researchers come in with their repurposing approach and an entirely new algorithm for developing antiviral drugs.
These are drugs that attack the virus itself and can cause it to regress from the start.
Antiviral drugs simply stop the virus from multiplying. The problem is that developing a new antiviral drug takes between 13 and 15 years and a staggering 20 million euros. Therefore, few such options exist. Antiviral drugs currently represent only 4.4% of the 4,051 approved drugs.
NTNU researchers have now investigated all possible existing active ingredients against viruses. These are molecules that have gone through some of the phases on the way to finally having medicinal value.
The solution has the potential to save many lives
The researchers have created a digital system called Drugvirus.info.
The system will give pharmaceutical companies and other researchers a head start in developing new treatments. Instead of spending funds on research for many years, they will be able to reduce their expenses to one year. Instead of spending millions on a new treatment, the cost will be reduced tenfold. The NTNU system will also save companies huge sums of money and save more lives.
“The system checks which active ingredients already exist that can be reused and redesigned so that we can stop new outbreaks in the critical phase before a new vaccine is developed,” says Kainov.
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Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Magazine reference:
Ianevski, A., et al. (2022) DrugVirus.info 2.0: An integrative data portal for Broad Spectrum Antivirals (BSAs) and BSA-containing drug combinations (BCCs). Nucleic acid research. doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkac348.
Source: www.news-medical.net