AFP, published on Thursday 06 February 2020 at 2:49 p.m.
The new coronavirus has shaken up all the plans of VirPath, a Lyon university laboratory which hopes to find as quickly as possible, among the already existing pharmacopoeia, an effective treatment against this virus which has already killed more than 560 people.
This laboratory offers an original strategy within the “REACTing” consortium, set up by Inserm to deal with health crises like the H5N1 flu, Ebola or Zika.
When most are active on the development of vaccines or test the few antivirals available, VirPath will seek drugs used for diseases that a priori have nothing to do with a respiratory infection like 2019-nCoV .
The repositioning of drugs for new anti-infectious therapeutic indications is their specialty. Many people know the history of Viagra, originally developed for angina pectoris and which, by accidental clinical observation, has shown other properties.
In Lyon, they do not wait for accidental observations to exploit the side effects of certain drugs. So they found that a drug prescribed to fight hypertension was very effective against all strains of influenza.
They are in the phase 2 clinical trial and hope to raise funds for a phase 3 trial, with a view to marketing authorization (MA) for this new therapeutic indication which could prove to be decisive, notes Manuel Rosa-Calatrava, research director at Inserm and assistant director of the laboratory.
Because the flu still kills, according to the WHO, with between 290,000 and 650,000 deaths worldwide each year.
VirPath has also repositioned other drugs against several respiratory viruses, including MERS-CoV in 2013 and other coronaviruses.
The laboratory is therefore preparing to test the effectiveness of these drugs and that against hypertension on 2019-nCoV.
“We hope to validate these repositioned drugs very quickly within a month, a month and a half in our preclinical models to be able to offer a therapeutic solution,” says Manuel Rosa-Calatrava.
– Faster and cheaper –
For the past week, this laboratory, a member of the International Center for Infectious Disease Research in Lyon (Ciri), has been mobilized 7 days a week.
The researchers are about to complete step number one, which consists of isolating the 2019-nCoV, duplicating it in order to have a sufficient work bank. The Pasteur Institute in Paris is the first in Europe to have succeeded in doing so at the end of January.
“We started with nasal swabs from infected patients hospitalized at the Bichat hospital in Paris with everything that a nose could contain,” says one of the laboratory technicians. A real work of biological investigation.
Preserved at -80 degrees, the 2019-nCoV will enrich the laboratory’s library, the oldest preserved virus is H1N1 WSN, isolated in London in 1933.
They are few to be authorized to work on this new coronavirus and to have the keys of “P3”, security laboratory of level 3. Behind a panel “Danger, biological risk”, they pass in two airlocks of protection. In the second, they wear a combination, mask, glasses and two pairs of purple gloves.
But they do not put on spacesuits as in “P4”, where Ebola hemorrhagic viruses are handled in a maximum level of security.
The “P3” is under negative pressure, that is to say that the air enters but cannot leave. There is therefore no risk of viruses escaping.
The team of researchers is stimulated by the fact that they feel useful and expected by the general public. “It is rare that there are expectations coming from outside,” slips a scientist.
Especially since they are convinced that their strategy can bring new solutions. Repositioning a drug is much faster and less expensive than developing a new one and can “allow us to be a rapid reaction force in the face of emerging virus health crises” with accelerated MAs, these drugs being well known because already marketed, says Manuel Rosa-Calatrava.
They also founded in 2017 a startup, Signia Therapeutics, to accelerate clinical development and access to the market for repositioned drugs.
It remains to find the right ones as quickly as the current epidemic requires.
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