Research let by Dr. Richard Plemper, a Professor at Georgia State, has demonstrated a new antiviral drug, Molnupiravir, effective against SARS-CoV-2. The new development offers researchers the opportunity to halt community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 until vaccination can be administered on a large scale. Currently, Molnupiravir is in advanced phase II/III clinical trials against SARS-CoV-2 infection.
"This is the first demonstration of an orally available drug to rapidly block SARS-CoV-2 transmission," said Plemper. "MK-4482/EIDD-2801 could be game-changing."
"We noted early on that MK-4482/EIDD-2801 has broad-spectrum activity against respiratory RNA viruses and that treating infected animals by mouth with the drug lowers the amount of shed viral particles by several orders of magnitude, dramatically reducing transmission," said Plemper. "These properties made MK-4482/EIDD/2801 a powerful candidate for pharmacologic control of COVID-19."
Their study was published in Nature Microbiology, where Plemper's team repurposed MK-4482/EIDD-2801 against SARS-CoV-2 using a ferret model.
"We believe ferrets are a relevant transmission model because they readily spread SARS-CoV-2, but mostly do not develop severe disease, which closely resembles SARS-CoV-2 spread in young adults," said Dr. Robert Cox, a postdoctoral fellow in the Plemper group and a co-lead author of the study.
"When we co-housed those infected and then treated source animals with untreated contact ferrets in the same cage, none of the contacts became infected," said Josef Wolf, a doctoral student in the Plemper lab and co-lead author of the study. By comparison, all contacts of source ferrets that had received placebo became infected.