The multi-purpose antiviral pill can treat colds, norovirus, flu and covid

In laboratory studies, a single drug has been found to inhibit a number of common viruses, including coronaviruses, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), norovirus, and influenza and hepatitis viruses. It will be tested in a clinical trial next year, raising hopes that the pill could one day be taken at home to ease uncomfortable symptoms or even limit infections should another viral pandemic occur.

“As far as we can tell, this is the first drug that has ever shown activity across all of these virus families,” he says Daniel Hadersco-founder of Model Medicines, the California-based company leading its development. If approved, Haders envisions it being a pill people could take if, for example, they have a flu-like illness but don’t know whether it’s the flu, covid-19, RSV or something else.

The drug was originally developed as a breast cancer treatment called ERA-923, but was abandoned in the early 2000s after it showed little benefit in clinical trials. Now, an AI drug discovery platform developed by Haders and his colleagues has found that a forgotten drug can inhibit a number of viruses through an unrelated mechanism.

The platform was tasked with finding a drug that could block a viral enzyme called RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, which many viruses use to copy their genomes and replicate. She specifically looked for drugs that could bind to a part of the enzyme called the Thumb-1 domain after discovering that this site is conserved across many viruses. “We wanted to find a biological choke point—a place where one drug against a single target could solve dozens of diseases,” says Haders.

According to data mining from old papers and patentsThe AI ​​named ERA-923 as a potential candidate that could bind to the Thumb-1 domain and thus block viral replication. “Just as OpenAI and Anthropic pulled all of digital human knowledge, we did the same for all of chemistry, biology, and clinical pharmacology,” says Haders. He has applied computational methods to drug design since his PhD research 20 years ago, but says the AI ​​tools available now are “a million times better”.

To test the AI’s prediction, the researchers measured the activity of the drug, renamed MDL-001, against a range of viruses in infected cells in the laboratory. They found it inhibited influenza A and B viruses, a number of coronaviruses that cause the common cold or covid-19, RSV (which causes flu-like symptoms and can be severe in infants), norovirus (also known as winter sickness), and hepatitis B, C, and D, which damage the liver.

MDL-001 also helped treat covid-19 in mice by reducing the levels of the underlying virus in their lungs and reducing their weight loss due to the disease. It had similar efficacy in mice with hepatitis B and C. Haders will present the results at the conference congress of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases in Munich, Germany in mid-April.

Peter White at the University of New South Wales in Australia is skeptical because other drugs that have been developed to target only the Thumb-1 domain inhibit hepatitis Cnot other viruses. But Model Medicines says MDL-001 has a different docking mode that allows it to work with multiple viruses. Daniel Rawle at the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Brisbane, Australia, also notes that “most antivirals that work in vitro fail in vivo.”

Model Medicines is now planning a clinical trial of MDL-001, which is expected to begin early next year. The first step will be to make sure it’s safe, although past studies in people with breast cancer have found that it is minimal side effects.

Currently, viral diseases are a big burden on well-being and productivity, as people often have to take time off work when they or their children get sick. It would be a game-changer if these conditions could be treated quickly with a short course of an at-home multi-purpose antiviral pill, Haders says. MDL-001 may also be useful in the event of future pandemics of novel coronaviruses or flu viruses, he says.

topics:

• viruses/
• infectious disease