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Medicine

Why Are HIV Drugs Being Used To Treat the New Coronavirus? (gizmodo.com) 140

Posted by BeauHD from the whatever-gets-the-job-done dept.
Gizmodo's Ed Cara explains why HIV drugs are being used to treat the new coronavirus. An anonymous reader shares the report: On Tuesday, the Japanese government announced it will begin clinical trials to test treatments for the deadly new coronavirus that's engulfed China and spread to over two dozen countries. Rather than new drugs, they'll be studying existing medications already used to treat HIV and other viral diseases. But why exactly are researchers hopeful that these drugs can be repurposed for the new coronavirus, and how likely are they to work? The new coronavirus, recently named SARS-CoV-2 due to its close genetic ties to the SARS coronavirus, is made out of RNA. Other RNA viruses include the ones that cause Ebola, hepatitis C, and yes, HIV/AIDS.

RNA viruses come in all shapes and sizes, and those that infect humans can do so in different ways. But many of the drugs that go after HIV and the hepatitis C virus broadly target weaknesses found in all sorts of viruses. The approved hepatitis C drug ribavirin, for instance, interferes with something called the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, an enzyme essential for many viruses -- including coronaviruses -- to produce more of themselves inside a cell. HIV drugs like lopinavir inhibit other enzymes that allow viruses to break down certain proteins, which cripples their ability to infect cells and replicate. Broad antiviral drugs like lopinavir should be able to work against SARS-CoV-2, scientists theorize. And there's already some circumstantial evidence they do. Some of these drugs have been successfully tested out for SARS and MERS, for instance, two other nasty coronaviruses that have emerged in recent years.
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Why Are HIV Drugs Being Used To Treat the New Coronavirus? More

Why Are HIV Drugs Being Used To Treat the New Coronavirus?

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  • Wow. Ten Minutes And Not Even Trolled Yet (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2020 @10:44PM (#59741694) Homepage Journal

    Given the level of discourse I've come to expect from the Internet these days, I half expected the first post to be someone seriously implying that it's because the same CIA/KGB/MI6/* scientists created all of them.... :-/

    But in all seriousness, I wonder what the long-term effects of those drug treatments are on the human body. After all, we use RNA, too. Does this, for example, also affect some of the mechanisms that the human body uses to repair damaged DNA or RNA, and pose a long-term increased cancer risk?

    Mind you, if you're dying of a horrible viral disease, even if it does cause cancer in a few decades, it still wouldn't be a hard choice, but I'm still curious what's going to happen in twenty or thirty or fifty years.

    • You just beat them to the punch in posting. I absolutely 100% promise the Coronavirus Troofers will be along any minute to blather to us about how this was cooked up by some evil group.

      • Can that evil group be the Chinese government? Or is that considered racist. I'm just curious, since that's currently the MSM angle.

        • Re:Wow. Ten Minutes And Not Even Trolled Yet (Score:5, Interesting)

          by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Tuesday February 18, 2020 @11:52PM (#59741842)

          Can that evil group be the Chinese government?

          That is already a widespread conspiracy theory in China. The CCP censors are trying to keep up, but discussion about it is rampant on WeChat.

          The Wuhan Institute of Virology [wikipedia.org] has a BSL-4 laboratory very close to where COVID-19 originated. The rumor is that the virus leaked from that lab. They blamed the live animal market as a cover story.

          Why would anyone put a BSL-4 lab in the middle of a big city?

          • Why would anyone put a BSL-4 lab in the middle of a big city?

            The part of the story where there is a bio lab with dangerous stuff nearby is true.

            But nearby isn't across the street. It clearly infected a large percent of the workers at the wet market early on.

            As to why it is in the middle of a big city, where else would they possibly put it? Important people work at important labs, important people live in important neighborhoods. Those are in the city. The lab is in a nicer part of town than the wet market.

          • Re:Wow. Ten Minutes And Not Even Trolled Yet (Score:5, Informative)

            by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @03:18AM (#59742076)

            BSL-4 is an incredibly strict protocol and it would require an incredible series of events for a BSL-4 complliant lab to leak viruses. No, the chinese aren't stupid. They've put a huge amount of effort into coronaviruses because SARs almost became pandemic and threatened to do to china what SARS-VOV2/COVID is doing now. A big disaster.

            The only way it'd get out of a BSL4 lab would be if someone was acting intentionally, but honesty I suspect it'd be easier to just find anthrax (that shits everywhere in the wild, as is botulism and some others), bioreactor it and do something hideous with that, if bioterrorism was the goal.

            Regardless, the DNA shows a relationship to SARs but with enough differences, including junk DNA , to suggest that this is just natural evolution in action. And anyway, you can spot messed with DNA from a mile away. Lots of repeats and satelites from the process.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

              Regardless, the DNA shows a relationship to SARs but with enough differences, including junk DNA , to suggest that this is just natural evolution in action. And anyway, you can spot messed with DNA from a mile away. Lots of repeats and satelites from the process.

              The other thing is, one type of common cold virus is coronavirus. Yes, in the same family as CoVID-2019 and SARS. (Another type of common cold is rhinovirus).

              Swine flu (H5N1) is just another variant of influenza that you get flu shots for.

              And FYI, i

          • Well, there are BSL-4 facilities in London, Melbourne, Berlin, Budapest, Johannesburg, Tokyo, Atlanta, San Antonio, Bern, Geneva, Rome, Hyderabad, Hamburg, Lyon, and Buenos Aires, just to name a few.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by HiThere ( 15173 )

            According to one story I read the theory was that a bat bit one of the researchers at the virology institute, and nobody knew anything was wrong until much later.

            Believe it if you want to. It seems an likely as any story. I give it 10% chance of being correct.

            • According to one story I read the theory was that a bat bit one of the researchers at the virology institute, and nobody knew anything was wrong until much later.

              Believe it if you want to. It seems an likely as any story. I give it 10% chance of being correct.

              Why isn't the story, according to your reading, not cited so we can, like you, be similarly informed according to the same story?

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by HiThere ( 15173 )

                I only gave it a 10% chance of being correct for a reason. I didn't consider the source worth remembering. And it's only as high as 10% because I don't know a more convincing story.

                P.S.: Please note I'm calling these things "stories", not reports. I give the thing perhaps a 20% chance of being agenda based fiction.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by HiThere ( 15173 )

                OK, I'm not sure this is the same story, but it's related, and sort of confirming. And note that the source isn't exactly reliable.

                https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ne... [dailymail.co.uk]

          • Well, nobody has mentioned Hong Kong for weeks ;)

        • Can that evil group be the Chinese government? Or is that considered racist. I'm just curious, since that's currently the MSM angle.

          Well they were evil for trying to cover it up. That's not racist.
          But they didn't cook it up like the crazies are claiming.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Mashiki ( 184564 )

            Well there's plenty of really shady things surrounding all of this stuff. In the US you've got people who were spying for China stealing level 3 and 4 bio samples and trying to ship them to China. We had a scientist at our bio4 lab here in Canada, escorted out by the RCMP and several of the students she was teaching. They're all still being held in custody, that was 6mo ago. They were also caught doing the same thing. There's the case in europe of antiviral designs nearly stolen by a chinese scientist a

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AK Marc ( 707885 )
          MSM is playing up the "bat soup" angle, despite the fact they traced the first humans to before the explosion at the market. The best guess now is an infected person was sick at the market, and it transmitted easier there, because people were eating, so it landed on food and was consumed, or the like.

          But I'm still seeing "bat soup", and not much of the "it's an escape from the lab" angle, yes I've seen that a little, just not wide in the MSM.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Are they that incompetent? The best they can come up with is something like the flu with a low mortality rate?

          I mean if you were trying to create a weapon or something then you would concentrate on finding a way to deploy Ebola, right?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Zak3056 ( 69287 )

            Are they that incompetent? The best they can come up with is something like the flu with a low mortality rate?

            I mean if you were trying to create a weapon or something then you would concentrate on finding a way to deploy Ebola, right?

            Von Clauswitz said, "War is the continuation of politics by other means." The goal is not to "kill everyone on the opposing side" but to use violence to achieve goals you cannot achieve otherwise. Something that spreads fast and incapacitates many, causing massive economic disruption but not necessarily killing a whole bunch of people sounds like a pretty good weapon.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Mashiki ( 184564 )

            Are they that incompetent? The best they can come up with is something like the flu with a low mortality rate?

            That depends, if we go by the standard recovered+death rate, this doesn't have the mortality rate of the flu. It's much closer to a 15-20% mortality rate right now, with 1:5 infections requiring serious or life saving intervention.

            I mean if you were trying to create a weapon or something then you would concentrate on finding a way to deploy Ebola, right?

            Because making/modifying a virii that have a non-airborne infection path is harder then it sounds. Remember you don't want to really kill everyone if you want a bioweapon, you want to make say 25% of the population seriously ill or dead so the resources are used internally and t

          • I don't remember where I heard/read it so don't ask for sources, I think it's from a movie, but I know a quote that goes like this: It's better to shoot to injure than to shoot to kill, if you injure the enemy soldier you incapacitated at least two soldiers, the injured one and the one that's getting him to safety, if you kill him, you only incapacitated one.

        • If you want to believe in conspiracy, maybe you should believe this one [foreignpolicy.com]. I would say this is a lot more plausible given that the US has launched an economic war against China.

      • I saw some Berko posting on facebook that Coronavirus isn't real and whats ACTUALLY happening is 5G towers being "activated" creating "dna frequencies" that are killing people, for the purpose of "population control". When I tried to tell them that its a ludicrous idea and why would anyone DO something as nutty as that, the reply was "Well how do you explain chemtrails then?". I half expected a "checkmate atheists!" to be thrown in there.

        Some people just have squirels in their brain.

        • I saw some Berko posting on facebook that Coronavirus isn't real and whats ACTUALLY happening is 5G towers being "activated" creating "dna frequencies" that are killing people, for the purpose of "population control". When I tried to tell them that its a ludicrous idea and why would anyone DO something as nutty as that, the reply was "Well how do you explain chemtrails then?". I half expected a "checkmate atheists!" to be thrown in there.

          Some people just have squirels in their brain.

          I have a sister-in-law who's been pushing the chemtrail conspiracy. I've known her since we were kids (we're in our 70s now) and when she pulled that shit the other day, I asked, "Where are all the dead people, Sherry?"

          She's whack.

        • Checkmate atheists?

          Every chemtrail person I've spoken with has been an atheist. (and I'm an atheist who thinks this is bs conspiracy nonsense).
      • Didn't you see that paper published by the Indian Institute of Yogic Flying at Chicken Tikka [nikkei.com] proving that there was a connection between HIV and nCov based on the similarity of a few tiny coinciding DNA fragments? Of course there's a connection, and so antiretrovirals will work for nCov.

    • Given the level of discourse I've come to expect from the Internet these days

      The Pangolin Army are real, the bats are with them, and Yeti are holding the antidote in escrow.

      You can't stop the New World Ordurr.

    • Re:Wow. Ten Minutes And Not Even Trolled Yet (Score:5, Informative)

      by Cyberax ( 705495 ) on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @03:29AM (#59742084)

      But in all seriousness, I wonder what the long-term effects of those drug treatments are on the human body. After all, we use RNA, too. Does this, for example, also affect some of the mechanisms that the human body uses to repair damaged DNA or RNA, and pose a long-term increased cancer risk?

      Pretty much all of the listed drugs have been in use for years. They target biological mechanisms that simply don't exist in normal cells.

    • The reason these are such broad antivirals is because they target reverse transcriptase, which is an enzyme specific to retroviruses. Viruses generally break a lot of your body's anti-cancer mechanisms, as these also help clear viral infection, so forgoing treatment for a viral infection out of fear of cancer is counterproductive outside special circumstances.
    • Duh, it's a first-strike from a private army that no-one suspects. Ever.

      The Salvation Army.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      I think messing around with that cave full of bats infected with a crapton of different corona viruses was not the best of the ideas.

    • Given the level of discourse I've come to expect from the Internet these days, I half expected the first post to be someone seriously implying that it's because the same CIA/KGB/MI6/* scientists created all of them.

      My father gave me that line last night. He gets his news from sketchy-at-best sources and was sure that Coronavirus was a made in a lab and China's trying to cover it up. Granted, I do think China is trying to cover up the extent of Coronavirus' spread there, but that's very different than "we ma

    • In the worst case, at least you have a much better chance of surviving long enough to get cancer. The risk would go away as soon as you stop using the medication. The risk of death isn't terribly high, but it's still dramatically higher than most illnesses out there. Anyone susceptible is going to accept a short window of helping cancerous cells to survive.

  • I mean they should already have some sample set of that if you just dug it up. hiv and hepatitis c levels in wuhan are not _that_ low so they would have had cases of overlap with the drugs already?

    • OK, now go look for citizen-taken videos of the inside of the hospitals. And then see if you still think they're doing that sort of tracking.

      And ask yourself, what is life generally like for people with HIV or Hep C in China? Are they given the highest quality of health care, or are they at a clinic for poor people as shown in the videos I mentioned?

  • Ribavirin (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Miamicanes ( 730264 ) on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @12:10AM (#59741864)

    Ribavirin isn't a "HIV drug".

    If you ask the FDA, it's a drug of last resort for treating serious cases of RSV in small children & the elderly.

    In *reality*, it's an awesome broad-spectrum antiviral that can stop most respiratory viruses in their tracks, especially when combined with oseltamivir ("Tamifiu") and pleconaril.

    So... why is the FDA so unenthused about it? There's evidence it's mildly teratogenic. In other words... it's believed to cause birth defects in pregnant women exposed to it, and women can be indirectly exposed to it via unprotected sex (its metabolites are detectable in semen for up to several months). So... the FDA will never bless its casual wholesale use for minor respiratory infections, even by men.

    Pleconaril suffered a similar fate ~15 years ago. The FDA considered approving it for men... and women presently using birth control... but it caused birth control failure. So the FDA nixed what literally *everyone* expected to be the biggest blockbuster drug in history... a drug that LITERALLY rapidly, and effectively cured the common cold.

    I pray to ${deity} this gets pleconaril approved, because once it's FDA-approved for *something*, doctors can prescribe it "off label" for *anything*, so I'll finally be able to get my hands on it after lusting after it for 15 years.

    I can already get Ribavirin online from India... 2x200mg, every 8 hours, combined with Tamiflu has nipped all but two respiratory infections (both colds) in the bud within a day or two. I get sick an average of 4-5 times a year (including summer influenza... the joy of living in a city where Argentines & Chileans visit while THEIR winter flu season is peaking in June or July). Tamiflu alone is hit or miss (mostly miss, though it does tend to keep it from being quite as bad), but adding Ribavirin to the menu *dramatically* boosts its effectiveness.

    Seriously. Thanks to Ribavirin, I've finally gotten to enjoy an illness-free December for the first time since... well... birth(*). And the one when I *did* get sick was a bacterial infection 3 years ago (now, I make sure I have a filled prescription for azithromycin packed before Thanksgiving & Christmas, and add it to the menu at the first hint of a runny nose that keeps getting worse a day after starting tamifiu + ribavirin).

    ---

    (*) Thanksgiving & Christmas are so infectious, I just take 1 tamiflu & 1 200mg ribavirin capsule per day between mid-November & MLK Day for prevention now.

    • A Phase II study that used an intranasal formulation of pleconaril failed to show a statistically significant result for either of its two primary efficacy endpoints, percentage of participants with rhinovirus PCR-positive colds and percentage of participants with asthma exacerbations together with rhinovirus-positive PCR.

      • > failed to show a statistically significant result for either of its two primary efficacy endpoints,

        Keep in mind, their primary "efficacy endpoint" was "prevented death", not "visibly reduced misery and expedited end of symptoms". Almost nobody dies from the cold unless they're near death to begin with. So... it wasn't useful at saving lives of critically-ill patients, and they massively discounted the value of reducing misery & inconvenience in otherwise-healthy people.

        Another study indicated that

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AK Marc ( 707885 )

      I pray to ${deity} this gets pleconaril approved

      https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/c... [sigmaaldrich.com]
      https://www.medchemexpress.com... [medchemexpress.com]

      Can't you get it from there? I note the second one has some disclaimers about "research" but I have no idea how thorough they check, if you claim to be a researcher.

    • ...and women presently using birth control... but it caused birth control failure

      I'll take the flu over an unwanted pregnancy. Jeez, Louise.

      • > I'll take the flu over an unwanted pregnancy. Jeez, Louise.

        Counterpoint: how many women who are coming down with enough of a cold to notice are going to be in any mood for sex *anyway*?

        Plus, condoms still work, and it doesn't give the fetus magic immunity to RU-486 if pregnancy still occurs. It's just that the FDA doesn't want to ever have to tell a woman, "Oops, you HAVE to get an abortion right away unless you want to risk a child with major birth defects. Sorry, better luck next time!"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by atisss ( 1661313 )

      From wikipedia

      Common side effects include feeling tired, headache, nausea, fever, muscle pains, and an irritable mood.[1] Serious side effects include red blood cell breakdown, liver problems, and allergic reactions.[1] Use during pregnancy results in harm to the baby.[1] Effective birth control is recommended for both males and females for at least 7 months during and after use.[3] The mechanism of action of ribavirin is not entirely clear.[1]

      Thanks, but no.. I rather have cold, than get liver damage and hope for something that's not researched completely

      • "liver problems" can occur from almost ANYTHING if you're vulnerable to them. That's one problem with the way adverse effects get reported... there's rarely any context given to understand *why* a rare side effect might occur in one patient, but not another.

        It's why officially, the adverse effects for ibuprofen include 'fever' and 'headache', and Ambien's include "insomnia". There's no review or curation... they just get tallied up regardless of absurdity.

    • Aren't drugs like antivirals prescription-based to prevent resistance, like what has happened to antibiotics? I usually get a long-lasting cold every winter which I attribute to me bicycling to work and having poor sleep routines. I would never dream of using drugs to treat that.

      Last time I needed prescription drugs was when I got both the flu and an airway infection at the same time. The fever would not go down after 7+ days of standard penicillin, at which point I got upgraded. Purchasing drugs abroad to

      • With antivirals, there are two factors: mutation & resistance.

        Mutation only occurs during replication. Stop replication dead in its tracks, and you stop the "mutation clock" as well.

        Resistance occurs when the drug doesn't work well enough to kill them all, so the resistant ones end up being the ones that survive.

        This is why combo therapy is increasingly the norm. With viruses, you're better off throwing everything you have at it right from the start than you are to try and dole out weaker drugs. Wipe it

    • I am curious as to why you get sick so frequently. Is your immune system compromised?

      For about 4 years straight (a looooong time ago), I would get nasty sinus infections around January of each year... but for the most part, I just don't get sick with any sort of regularity.

      Am I the odd one out or are you, and what might be the cause?

      (ya gotta be kidding me. CAPTCHA is 'deadly')

  • Since PrEP can be used by HIV-negative people to prevent themselves getting HIV, could it also work against coronavirus?

    I haven't heard of PrEP being used against other viruses, but would it work in the same way?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      That's clearly much too broad a claim, and I don't even know what PrEP is. There may be some viruses it would work against. Even that claim would require a lot more knowledge that I have, though. You'd need to test it against each case where you thought it might work.

      • PrEP is pre-exposure prophylaxis, which could mean anything but is generally used to mean taking anti-retroviral drugs to prevent HIV iinfection in people with high risk of exposure. A quick Google search found the estimated cost of maintaining PrEP for HIV protection is $8,000 a year or more. (Though insurance might cover drug cost for high-risk patients.)
  • Didn't the WHO name it COVID-19, not SARS-CoV-2?

  • The question intriguing me is why Gizmodo decided to give the virus a different name to everybody else.

  • Just in case anyone else was a little confused by the 'new' name, here's an explanation:

    https://www.sciencemag.org/new... [sciencemag.org]

    They should have stuck with the traditional method of naming new viruses and named it after the closest body of water, political correctness be damned.

  • ... when all this broke loose.

    It was an accident. I can't release all the details because we were not supposed to have slipped Corona into the lab for watching eSports on the TV we were not supposed to have.

    We ditched the cases of Corona out the ass end of a C-130 in the form of a chemtrail.

    I apologize for any inconvenience the loss of the beer and TV may have caused me.

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