FDA approved drugs with broad anti-coronaviral activity inhibit SARS-CoV-2 in vitro

Stuart Weston; Rob Haupt; James Logue; Krystal Matthews; Matthew B. Frieman

Healthcare providers lack pharmaceutical countermeasures against SARS-CoV-2, beyond public health interventions, and there remains a desperate need for rapid development of antiviral therapeutics. A potential route to candidate antivirals is through repurposing of already approved drugs. Numerous chemical compounds are approved for use in humans around the world (such as by the FDA), and their safety profiles are known. Many of these have also been found to have antiviral activity even though that is not their intended use (5) . We have previously screened a library of FDA approved drugs for antiviral activity against two other highly pathogenic human coronaviruses, SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV (4) . That work found 27 approved drugs that inhibited replication of both of these coronaviruses, suggesting that they may have broad anti-coronaviral activity and inhibit SARS-CoV-2. With the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, we have investigated whether 20 of these compounds have antiviral activity against the novel virus. Since these compounds are already approved for use in humans, they make ideal candidates for drug repurposing and rapid development as antiviral therapeutics.