We’ve all recently gotten a crash-course in drug repurposing, thanks to near-daily news reports about efforts to identify existing medicines that could help treat COVID-19 in the early phase of the pandemic. A team of scientists at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University jumped into the fray in the spring of 2020, applying novel computational drug repurposing approaches to confront the COVID-19 challenge. This early work led to the surprising prediction that some, but not all, types of statins (drugs that are widely prescribed to lower cholesterol) might protect patients against SARS-CoV-2 infection. In the flurry of clinical studies being published by other scientists studying COVID-19, some found that statins seemed to reduce mortality in COVID-19 patients, while others found no effect – but these studies did not discriminate between different types of statin drugs.
