The FDA-Approved Oral Drug Nitazoxanide Amplifies Host Antiviral Responses and Inhibits Ebola Virus

Jasenosky, Luke D.; Cadena, Cristhian; Mire, Chad E.; Borisevich, Viktoriya; Haridas, Viraga; Ranjbar, Shahin; Nambu, Aya; Bavari, Sina; Soloveva, Veronica; Sadukhan, Supriya; Cassell, Gail H.; Geisbert, Thomas W.; Hur, Sun; Goldfeld, Anne E.

To begin to characterize the mechanisms involved in NTZ's antiviral activity, we next tested NTZ's effect on a second RNA virus, the rhabdovirus VSV, which, like EBOV, is a member of the order Mononegavirales, and which also allowed testing under biosafety level 2 conditions. NTZ pretreatment of A549 cells for 4 h inhibited the growth of a firefly luciferase-expressing VSV (VSV-Luc) reporter virus (Cureton et al., 2012) in A549 cells, with greater than 99% inhibition of VSV-Luc achieved at an NTZ concentration of 12 mM and >99.9% inhibition obtained at 18 mM ( Figure 3A , left).