COVID-19: combining antiviral and anti-inflammatory treatments
· 2 years ago · 1078 views
Both coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and severe
acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) are characterised
by an overexuberant inflammatory response and,
for SARS, viral load is not correlated with the worsening
of symptoms.1,2 In our previous Correspondence to
The Lancet,
3
we described how BenevolentAI’s proprietary artificial intelligence (AI)-derived knowledge
graph,4
queried by a suite of algorithms, enabled
identification of a target and a potential therapeutic
against SARS coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2; the causative
organism in COVID-19). We identified a group of
approved drugs that could inhibit clathrin-mediated
endocytosis and thereby inhibit viral infection of
cells (appendix). The drug targets are members of
the numb-associated kinase (NAK) family—including
AAK1 and GAK—the inhibition of which has been
shown to reduce viral infection in vitro.5,6 Baricitinib
was identified as a NAK inhibitor, with a particularly
high affinity for AAK1, a pivotal regulator of clathrinmediated endocytosis. We suggested that this drug
could be of use in countering SARS-CoV-2 infections,
subject to appropriate clinical testing.