Use of the Prestwick Chemical Drug-Library for COVID research
F. Touret, M. Gilles, K. Barral, A. Nougairède, E. Decroly, X. de Lamballerie & B. Coutard
bioRxiv (2020)
In vitro screening of a FDA approved chemical library reveals potential inhibitors of SARS-CoV-2 replication.
Repurposing of approved drugs is a strategy that can bypass the time-consuming stages of drug development.
In this study, the researchers screened the PRESTWICK CHEMICAL LIBRARY composed of 1,520 approved drugs in an infected cell-based assay. The robustness of the screen was assessed by the identification of drugs that already demonstrated in vitro antiviral effect against SARS-CoV-2.
Thereby, 90 compounds were identified as positive hits from the screen and were grouped according to their chemical composition and their known therapeutic effect. Then EC50 and CC50 were determined for a subset of 15 compounds and, eventually eleven compounds such as macrolides, antibiotics, proton pump inhibitors, antiarrhythmic agents or CNS drugs emerged showing antiviral potency with 2 < EC50 ≤ 20 μM. By providing new information on molecules inhibiting SARS-CoV-2 replication in vitro, this study provides information for the selection of drugs to be further validated in vivo.