Quote:
Originally Posted by Pete
I'm just wondering how many old school drugs will be effective on this virus - and then find out they would have been effective against other SARS/MERS type stuff?
But they were never looked at because there is no money in old drugs.
Link to JJ's story
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/coron...7Ux?li=AAgfYrC |
That is something I've wondered about as well. One thing I learned while working in the industry is that no one really does a negative screen on small molecule compounds. They look for compounds that are lets say are specific for one protein in a pathway that they are trying to target. They'll examine the SAR (structure activity relationships) for the few compounds that look promising.Then, they'll ask themselves if it binds to anything else in that pathway by generating knockouts for that protein in a cell line that they chose for screening and also do binding assays which all take a very long time. If the answer is no and there is no toxicity to healthy cells, then they move further to mouse studies and then eventually to humans. They will not try to do binding assays with the small molecule on any protein that is not involved in some way with the target of interest simply because they are curious. It comes down to how many people you have on your team and how much time you have to finish a project. This is why you get compounds that are essentially multi-purpose but are not known because they have not been evaluated before they hit the drug market.