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New drugs against COVID discovered thanks to measurements on IUVS

Immagine e grafici delle misurazioni

A recent study published in the scientific journal Chemical Communications has identified three drugs that can be employed to treat SARS-CoV-2 infections.
The research team coordinated by Prof. Jussara Amato and Bruno Pagano of the Department of Pharmacy of the University of Naples Federico II, has employed ligand-based pharmacophore virtual screening strategy and multiple biophysical techniques to identify drugs already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that might be effective against SARS-CoV-2.
An innovative aspect of this research regards the drug's target: specific RNA structures formed in the viral genome, known as G-quadruplexes.
Thanks to the unconventional characteristics of the Raman instrumentation installed at the IUVS beamline at Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste and through the patient comparative analysis of the spectral changes generated on the Raman spectra in the RNA-drug interaction, the researchers Francesco D'Amico and Silvia Di Fonzo of the IUVS’s research group have obtained key information on the drug/RNA interactions at the molecular level.
Further in vitro experiments demonstrated that the screened drugs could effectively interfere with the replication of SARS-CoV-2. Such a significant result lays the basis for future studies aimed to evaluate the antiviral activity of such drugs.
The approach employed in this study might result impactful for targeting viral RNA, even beyond SARS-CoV-2.

Further details at the following link: http://xlink.rsc.org/?DOI=D2CC03135C
 
Last Updated on Tuesday, 08 November 2022 11:30