Nevan Krogan and Adolfo García-Sastre - May 20, 2020

Nevan Krogan, PhD, University of California, San Francisco, "Genome wide screening and interactome"

Adolfo García-Sastre, PhD, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, "In search of new therapies against COVID-19"

In this talk, Drs. Garcia-Sastre and Krogan discussed the benefits of collaborative research on SARS-CoV-2. Infection leads to high initial viral copies, which are lost after treatment. In peripheral blood, T- and B-cell depletion is observed with a regeneration of classical monocytes and pending cytokine profile. The majority of clades in New York are of European origin, though diverse origins are observed. The virus likely first arrived in NY around late January. To identify potential therapeutic avenues, they analyzed virus-host interactome to determine protein-protein interactions. The idea was to shift the paradigm in drug development to the host rather than to the virus itself. In this way, resistance is not as important and non-pathogenic strategies can be developed. 300+ genes were identified as being important to COVID replication, among which 69 were druggable proteins. This PPI set thus far been shared with 87 countries and counting. 97 drugs have been identified and tested. Ten agents have been shown to effectively kill the virus, consistently across two labs. The focus is on Sigma R1/R2 modulators such as antimalarials, hormones, antihistamines, etc. PB28 might be a more potent antiviral than hydroxychloroquine.