Developing a new drug from scratch takes many years, but as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to kill thousands of people around the world each day, some therapeutics researchers are trying a faster way to find a COVID-19 drug. Scientists, including those at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, are testing existing drugs that are already proven safe in humans, to see whether they can be repurposed to treat COVID-19 patients.
The Broad’s Center for the Development of Therapeutics (CDoT) is a part of this effort. It is making copies of its Drug Repurposing Hub — a collection of nearly 7,000 compounds that are either FDA-approved or proven safe in clinical trials — and sharing them with collaborators in Boston and around the world to help them hunt for existing compounds that might prove effective against COVID-19.
Drug repurposing works. The FDA recently granted emergency use authorization for a drug called remdesivir for COVID-19. The compound was originally developed for hepatitis C and was tested in humans in 2015 and 2016 as a possible treatment for Ebola before showing benefits for COVID-19 patients. (The Drug Repurposing Hub was not involved in this effort.)
We spoke with institute scientist Florence Wagner, director of medicinal chemistry in CDoT and the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, to learn more about how she and her team are working with other research groups on both near- and long-term projects. We also spoke about how drug repurposing, as the first phase of COVID-19 drug development, holds tremendous potential for rapid clinical impact.
