Veterinary scientists join drug hunt against coronavirus

India’s veterinary scientists have now joined the hunt for a drug for the treatment of COVID-19.

Scientists at the Hisar-based National Centre for Veterinary Type Cultures are screening their library comprising 94 small molecule chemical inhibitors for anti-virals for coronavirus.

The Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB) has approved support for the study, an official statement said on Thursday.

“All the drugs for treatment of the virus were designed to hit the viral protein. But when a virus mutates, the drug becomes ineffective, as it won't bind on the viral protein,” Naveen Kumar, senior scientist at NCVTC told DH here.

Kumar said he was exploring an alternative strategy of targeting the proteins in the host cell that would be used by the virus to replicate.

“We are targeting proteins that are not used by the host (human) cell to replicate, but are used by the virus to grow,” he said adding that the host-directed anti-virals have less tendency of becoming resistant to drugs

Kumar believes that the institute’s collection of small molecule inhibitors will be the resource to find this anti-viral weapon targeting cellular proteins, protein-protein (virus-host) interaction, or epigenetic regulators for COVID-19.

Kumar would now study how these molecule inhibitors work against coronaviruses.

“The targets of these inhibitors are well characterised in cancer, however, their role in the virus life cycle is not known. The selected candidates (hits) with anti-coronavirus activity will be subjected to study their molecular mechanism of action, besides examining generation of potential drug-resistant virus variants,” Kumar said.

“Chemical library screening in medicinal chemistry research is a useful methodology that considerably shortens drug discovery and development cycle, especially for newly identified etiologic agents, such as SARS-Cov-2,” Prof. Sandeep Verma, Secretary, SERB said.