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Human Organ Chips Shift Amodiaquine from Old Antimalarial to Promising COVID-19 Treatment
May 3, 2021
The ACE2 receptor protein (green), which the SARS-CoV-2 viruses uses to enter cells, is highly expressed on the surfaces of human airway cells grown in the Airway Chip. This faithful mimicking of human biology enables the study of how viruses interact with their hosts cells. [Wyss Institute at Harvard University]
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As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, the pace of vaccine development has surpassed anyone’s wildest expectations. Unfortunately, drug development for treatments has not kept the same pace. Indeed, there are still very few effective treatments for COVID-19. Now, a collaboration between four research institutes has identified the antimalarial drug amodiaquine as a potent inhibitor of SARS-CoV-2 infection in human lung cells and in living preclinical models. This breakthrough helped secure the inclusion of amodiaquine in a COVID-19 clinical trial that is currently u
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A Wyss Institute-led collaboration spanning four research labs and hundreds of miles has used the Institute s organ-on-a-chip (Organ Chip) technology to identify the antimalarial drug amodiaquine as a potent inhibitor of infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
The Organ Chip-based drug testing ecosystem established by the collaboration greatly streamlines the process of evaluating the safety and efficacy of existing drugs for new medical applications, and provides a proof-of-concept for the use of Organ Chips to rapidly repurpose existing drugs for new medical applications, including future pandemics. The research is reported in
Nature Biomedical Engineering.
While many groups around the world have been testing existing drugs for efficacy against COVID-19 using cultured cells, it is well known that cells grown in a dish do not behave like the cells in a living human body, and many drugs that appear effective in lab studies do not work in patients. T