Japanese scientists repurpose anti-malarial drug to fight covid
A team of scientists has identified an anti-malarial drug, mefloquine, that is effective against SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing Covid-19. Tokyo: The team from Tokyo University of Science and others mathematically modelled the effectiveness of mefloquine to predict its potential real-world impact, if applied to treat Covid-19. They found that mefloquine could reduce the overall viral load in affected patients to under 7 per cent and shorten the "time-till-virus-elimination" by 6.1 days. Their findings are published in Frontiers in Microbiology. To identify drugs with higher antiviral potency than existing antivirals, the team first screened approved anti-parasitic/anti-protozoal drugs. They found that mefloquine had the highest anti-SARS-CoV-2 activity among the tested compounds. Upon testing it against other quinoline derivatives, such as hydrochloroquine, in a cell line mimicking the cell-based environments of human lung cells, they found it to be better. "In our cell as...