A research team at UCSF has changed on a possible treatment for COVID-19, even though it is a cancer remedy manufactured by a Spanish firm and has not yet been approved for any use in the United States.
The drug is called Aplidin (generic name: plitidepsin), and it is a compound originally derived from one found in a bizarre marine animal found near Ibiza, Aplidium albicans. As the team explains in a new report in the journal Science, plitidepsin has been shown to dramatically inhibit the replication of SARS CoV-2, also known as the coronavirus, and can actually be 30 times more effective than an antiviral treatment than remdesivir, which has been used in an emergency in patients in clinical conditions since last winter.
The team that discovered the new treatment was led by UCSF systems biologist Nevan Krogan, and it appears to be possibly the biggest success to come from a project that began last February to use existing drugs and compounds that can act as antiviral treatments. work, to isolate. As we reported in May, Krogan’s team at the Quantitative Biosciences Institute at UCSF abandoned everything they worked on last winter to focus on COVID-19, and by April, they had identified ten existing drugs that were promising for the new to treat disease.
Scientists in San Francisco and in other teams around the world who participated in the same effort have found two human proteins that appear to be key in the fight against the coronavirus’ ability to replicate in humans, Sigma R1 and Sigma R2, and to block their drug. initially looking focused on this. Aplidine works on the human protein known as eEF1A, and because it focuses on the human part of the equation and not on the virus, it should hopefully remain effective as the virus mutates.
And the project highlights something that scientists have long emphasized about the importance of conserving biodiversity in the world’s oceans and elsewhere. The marine invertebrates from which this compound is derived are an ascidian or sea urchin that “looks a bit like a body without a brain,” as the Chronicle explains. The drug is actually owned by a Spanish company founded by a diver, Pharma Mar, and has been approved in Australia for the treatment of blood cancer, known as multiple myeloma. It is also used in the EU as a treatment for lymphoblastic leukemia.
The drug is in phase 2 clinical trials in Spain, during which it was tested on 45 seriously ill COVID patients. Based on data on the first 27 of the patients, the drug significantly reduced the amount of time people spent in the hospital, by 81 percent after 15 days home, compared to a typical rate of less than 50 percent. And according to a separate article, Aplidin also appears to be effective against the British variant of the virus.
“We need some new weapons in the arsenal,” Krogan told Chronicle. “It’s by far the best thing we’ve seen.” Krogan says the team investigating this drug was also led by virus expert Adolfo García-Sastre, based at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.
UCSF-Expert Infectious Diseases, dr. Peter Chin-Hong, says that if the drug from a phase 3 study still looks good, it’s likely to be part of a “cocktail” of treatments for COVID. Doctors across the country are already treating patients with a drink of brake desivir and the steroid dexamethasone, and in Australia Aplidin is being used in combination with dexamethasone to treat multiple myeloma.
Aplidin has to undergo increasingly broad phase 3 clinical trials, which are said to take place in both Spain and the US. It remains to be seen how long it could be – if it turns out to be as effective as the early tests suggest – before the drug becomes widely available here.
Top image: an image of the sea spray Aplidium albicans found in the Balearic Islands, from which the synthetic drug Aplidin is obtained. Photo via Pharma Mar