JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Could a drug for one of the oldest known diseases help us in the fight against COVID-19?
A UF Health researcher finds an antibiotic used to treat leprosy could slow the spread of virus variants. This would be especially helpful because the leprosy drug is already FDA-approved.
The earliest account of leprosy, according to some researchers, was written on Egyptian Papyrus around 1550 B.C. By comparison, COVID-19 has been around for just over a year, and the variants less than that.
By creating a digital model, UF Health researcher Dr. David Ostrov found a pattern of mutations and a structural pocket in the highly contagious virus variant first detected in the U.K.
"More than a year ago, people started to notice that the virus was accumulating a mutation in this particular position that Bette Korbe found," Ostrov said. "It took by June for those variants to take over the entire world. So the majority of coronaviruses around the world right now have this Bette mutation. So if we can find drugs that bind the site encoded by this mutation, we might have new drugs that will have direct antiviral activity against all the emerging variants."
It's variants that health experts warn could spark another surge and are responsible for rising numbers of coronavirus cases around the globe.
Could emerging variants impact the effectiveness of a vaccine? Ostrov believes it's unlikely.
"If there is a mutation in an emerging variant that influences binding to one out of the six of these molecules that's able to stimulate T cells with pieces of the virus, it's unlikely that that mutation will influence binding to all six of them," Ostrov said. "To my way of thinking, it's unlikely that these emerging variants are going to have a drastic effect on the effectiveness of the vaccine."
Ostrov screened about 1200 FDA-approved drugs and the next step is to identify two to four that could help the most against COVID-19. The following step would be clinical trials
Sulfoxone is the anti-leprosy drug used in Ostrov's research. Other published research shows similar findings with another leprosy drug called clofazamine, already FDA-approved and said to be low-cost.
In the U.S. there are 150 to 250 cases of leprosy reported each year, according to the CDC. Globally up to three million people live with disabilities related to leprosy.