A team of Australian researchers at Monash University in Melbourne have found that Ivermectin — an FDA-approved anti-parasitic drug that has been used to effectively fight viruses including HIV, Influenza, and Zika — was able to stop the SARS-CoV-2 virus from growing in cell cultures.
While promising, the drug has yet to be shown to have the same effect inside the human body, because the Australian research was conducted “in vitro,” meaning it was in a Petri dish at a lab. The researchers are still trying to nail down funding for pre-clinical testing and clinical trials, after which they’d have to start the long approval process for the trials themselves.
The results, though, are promising. In just 48 hours, the scientists say, all genetic material of the virus was eradicated.
“We found that even a single dose could essentially remove all viral RNA by 48 hours and that even at 24 hours there was a really significant reduction in it,” Kylie Wagstaff, lead researcher and co-author of the study published today in Antiviral Research, said in a statement.
“Ivermectin is very widely used and seen as a safe drug,” Wagstaff said. “We need to figure out now whether the dosage you can use it at in humans will be effective — that’s the next step.”
“As the virologist who was part of the team who were first to isolate and share SARS-COV2 outside of China in January 2020, I am excited about the prospect of Ivermectin being used as a potential drug against COVID-19,” Leon Caly, senior medical scientist at the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory (VIDRL) at the Doherty Institute, said.
A vaccine for COVID-19 is likely still at least a year out, despite research teams across the world fast tracking work on potential vaccines. But that doesn’t mean we’re doomed.
“In times when we’re having a global pandemic and there isn’t an approved treatment, if we had a compound that was already available around the world then that might help people sooner,” Wagstaff said in the statement. “Realistically it’s going to be a while before a vaccine is broadly available.”
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https://www.poison.org/articles/ivermectin-your-dogs-heartworm-medicine-173The Full Story
Sometimes new drugs are found in unusual places. The antiparasitic drug ivermectin was discovered in the 1970s in bacteria isolated from the soil on a Japanese golf course. Ivermectin was called the first "endectocide" since it was active against both endoparasites (parasites that live inside the host) and ectoparasites (parasites that live on the outside of the host).
Ivermectin was initially developed as a veterinary antiparasitic drug. Of particular importance today is ivermectin's ability to prevent heartworm infections in dogs with monthly dosing (e.g., Heartgard). Ivermectin has also protected hundreds of millions of livestock from a variety of parasites.
Ivermectin lotion is approved by the FDA for the treatment of head lice. Unlike many other treatments for head lice, ivermectin lotion only needs to be applied once. When given orally, ivermectin can be used for treating head or pubic lice and scabies (an itchy, highly contagious skin disease caused by mites burrowing in the skin). Oral ivermectin is useful to control outbreaks of scabies in nursing homes where whole-body application of topical agents is difficult.
Ivermectin's greatest impact on human health has been in Africa. Since 1987, in addition to its use for other parasitic infestations, ivermectin has been used extensively to control onchocerciasis with 1.4 billion treatments so far. Onchocerciasis is also called "river blindness" because the blackfly that transmits the disease breeds in fast-moving streams and rivers. Once within the body, the adult female worm produces thousands of juvenile worms that migrate to the skin and eyes and can produce severe itching and eye injury that can lead to blindness.
Ivermectin kills the juvenile worms, but not the adult females. The effectiveness of the drug lasts up to 12 months, but mature female worms produce offspring for 15 years, so ivermectin has to be taken once a year for that long.
Over 300 million people take ivermectin each year. To date, ivermectin has been shown to be a safe and well-tolerated drug. Most adverse reactions are mild and temporary, such as loss of appetite, headache, muscle aches, lack of energy, and fever. There have been a small number of severe adverse events and even some deaths in humans treated with ivermectin in onchocerciasis-control programs. The reason for these events is unknown, but they might be linked to the presence of large numbers of other parasites that are killed off in treated patients.
If you suspect someone has swallowed ivermectin, do not make the person vomit. Immediately check the webPOISONCONTROL® online tool for help or call Poison Control at 1-800-222-1222.
When ivermectin gets in the eyes, minor irritation and redness can occur. Serious eye injury is not likely, but the eyes should be rinsed immediately. Remove contact lenses and use lots of room temperature water. For children, pour water onto the bridge of the nose and let it gently run into the eyes. Encourage blinking. After rinsing, call Poison Control or use the webPOISONCONTROL tool for help.
Mary Elizabeth May, RN, BA, MPH
Certified Specialist in Poison Information
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On Friday, April 3, 2020, 04:12:39 PM PDT, jim bell <
jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8184997/Doctors-worldwide-say-malaria-drug-best-coronavirus-treatment.htmlDoctors around the globe report that the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine seems the most effective treatment they've tried for coronavirus patients - but less than half as many doctors are prescribing it in the US as in other hard-hit countries like Spain.
A survey of 6,200 doctors around the globe reveals that while few corners of the world are untouched by the virus, the pandemic is being handled very differently from country-to-country.
And in some measures, the US continues to fall behind other nations' responses.
For example, an American waits an average of four to five days to get results back after being tested for COVID-19. Half of doctors in Europe and most in China get the test results back within 24-hours.
Dr Murali Doraiswamy, an adviser to Sermo, urged that countries should take note of what is working for doctors and governments elsewhere and move quickly to adopt practices that are saving lives.
Hydroxychloroquine (pictured) was deemed the most effective coronavirus treatment comared to other options by more doctors worldwide than any other in a global survey
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On Sat, Feb 8, 2020 at 9:18 PM jim bell <
jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
jim bell
[chloroquine is an old-line drug typically used against malaria]
[partial quote follows]
https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/science/020620/could-an-old-malaria-drug-help-fight-the-new-coronASBMB Today Science Could an old malaria drug help fight the new coronavirus?
Could an old malaria drug
help fight the new coronavirus?
By John Arnst
February 06, 2020
Chloroquine might be getting new life as an antiviral treatment for the novel coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan, China in late 2019 and has infected some 25,000 people in more than 25 countries. For decades, the drug was a front-line treatment and prophylactic for malaria.
In a three-page paper published Tuesday in Cell Research, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s State Key Laboratory of Virology write that both chloroquine and the antiviral remdesivir were, individually, “highly effective” at inhibiting replication of the novel coronavirus in cell culture. Their drug screen evaluated five other drugs that were not effective. The authors could not be reached for comment.
Though the paper is brief, John Lednicky, a professor at the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute, found its results intriguing. “It’s interesting in that it really lacks a lot of details but, nevertheless, if you look at the data as presented, at least in vitro, it seems like chloroquine can be used as an early-stage drug,” he said. “It would be very good if these types of experiments were repeated by more laboratories to see whether the same results occur across the board.”
Chloroquine is a synthetic form of quinine, a compound found in the bark of cinchona trees native to Peru and used for centuries to treat malaria.
Chloroquine was an essential element of mass drug administration campaigns to combat malaria throughout the second half of the 20th century, and remains one of the World Health Organization’s essential medicines. However, after the malaria parasites Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax began exhibiting resistance to the drug in the 1960s and 1980s, respectively, it was replaced by similar antimalarial compounds and combination therapies. Chloroquine is still widely used against the three other species of plasmodium and to treat autoimmune disorders and some cases of amebiasis, an intestinal infection caused by the amoeba Entamoeba histolytica.
Chloroquine’s antiviral properties were explored in the mid-1990s against HIV and in the following decade against severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which is closely related to the novel coronavirus. In 2004, researchers in Belgium found that chloroquine inhibited replication of SARS in cell culture. The following year, however, another team at Utah State University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong evaluated a gamut of compounds against SARS replication in mice infected with the virus, finding that chloroquine was only effective as an anti-inflammatory agent. They recommended that it could be used in combination with compounds that prevent replication. Nevertheless, in 2009, the Belgian group found that lethal infections of human coronavirus OC43, a relative of SARS, could be averted in newborn mice by administering chloroquine through the mother’s milk.
[end of partial quote]
Also:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41422-020-0282-0Remdesivir and chloroquine effectively inhibit the recently emerged novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in vitro
Manli Wang, Ruiyuan Cao, Leike Zhang, Xinglou Yang, Jia Liu, Mingyue Xu, Zhengli Shi, Zhihong Hu, Wu Zhong & Gengfu Xiao
Cell Research (2020)Cite this article
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Dear Editor,
In December 2019, a novel pneumonia caused by a previously unknown pathogen emerged in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people in central China. The initial cases were linked to exposures in a seafood market in Wuhan.1 As of January 27, 2020, the Chinese authorities reported 2835 confirmed cases in mainland China, including 81 deaths. Additionally, 19 confirmed cases were identified in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, and 39 imported cases were identified in Thailand, Japan, South Korea, United States, Vietnam, Singapore, Nepal, France, Australia and Canada. The pathogen was soon identified as a novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), which is closely related to sever acute respiratory syndrome CoV (SARS-CoV).2 Currently, there is no specific treatment against the new virus. Therefore, identifying effective antiviral agents to combat the disease is urgently needed.
An efficient approach to drug discovery is to test whether the existing antiviral drugs are effective in treating related viral infections. The 2019-nCoV belongs to Betacoronavirus which also contains SARS-CoV and Middle East respiratory syndrome CoV (MERS-CoV). Several drugs, such as ribavirin, interferon, lopinavir-ritonavir, corticosteroids, have been used in patients with SARS or MERS, although the efficacy of some drugs remains controversial.3 In this study, we evaluated the antiviral efficiency of five FAD-approved drugs including ribavirin, penciclovir, nitazoxanide, nafamostat, chloroquine and two well-known broad-spectrum antiviral drugs remdesivir (GS-5734) and favipiravir (T-705) against a clinical isolate of 2019-nCoV in vitro.
Standard assays were carried out to measure the effects of these compounds on the cytotoxicity, virus yield and infection rates of 2019-nCoVs. Firstly, the cytotoxicity of the candidate compounds in Vero E6 cells (ATCC-1586) was determined by the CCK8 assay. Then, Vero E6 cells were infected with nCoV-2019BetaCoV/Wuhan/WIV04/20192 at a multiplicity of infection (MOI) of 0.05 in the presence of varying concentrations of the test drugs. DMSO was used in the controls. Efficacies were evaluated by quantification of viral copy numbers in the cell supernatant via quantitative real-time RT-PCR (qRT-PCR) and confirmed with visualization of virus nucleoprotein (NP) expression through immunofluorescence microscopy at 48 h post infection (p.i.) (cytopathic effect was not obvious at this time point of infection). Among the seven tested drugs, high concentrations of three nucleoside analogs including ribavirin (half-maximal effective concentration (EC50) = 109.50 μM, half-cytotoxic concentration (CC50) > 400 μM, selectivity index (SI) > 3.65), penciclovir (EC50 = 95.96 μM, CC50 > 400 μM, SI > 4.17) and favipiravir (EC50 = 61.88 μM, CC50 > 400 μM, SI > 6.46) were required to reduce the viral infection (Fig. 1a and Supplementary information, Fig. S1). However, favipiravir has been shown to be 100% effective in protecting mice against Ebola virus challenge, although its EC50 value in Vero E6 cells was as high as 67 μM,4 suggesting further in vivo studies are recommended to evaluate this antiviral nucleoside. Nafamostat, a potent inhibitor of MERS-CoV, which prevents membrane fusion, was inhibitive against the 2019-nCoV infection (EC50 = 22.50 μM, CC50 > 100 μM, SI > 4.44). Nitazoxanide, a commercial antiprotozoal agent with an antiviral potential against a broad range of viruses including human and animal coronaviruses, inhibited the 2019-nCoV at a low-micromolar concentration (EC50 = 2.12 μM; CC50 > 35.53 μM; SI > 16.76). Further in vivo evaluation of this drug against 2019-nCoV infection is recommended. Notably, two compounds remdesivir (EC50 = 0.77 μM; CC50 > 100 μM; SI > 129.87) and chloroquine (EC50 = 1.13 μM; CC50 > 100 μM, SI > 88.50) potently blocked virus infection at low-micromolar concentration and showed high SI (Fig. 1a, b).