By mapping the proteins that SARS-CoV-2 interacts with once it's in the human body, an international team of researchers — working together via videoconferencing — hope to find drugs to block those interactions, the New York Times reports.
Researchers led by Nevan Krogan, director of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute at University of California, San Francisco, first sought to identify what human proteins the SARS-CoV-2 viral proteins interact with, it writes. They generated a list of some 400 such human proteins that another group of researchers led by UCSF's Kevan Shokat is using to search through databases to determine if there are any already approved drugs that affect those interactions.
According to the Times, they've uncovered 50 promising ones, which they've shipped to labs in New York and in Paris, where researchers are testing them against coronaviruses, first in cells then perhaps in animal models. Additionally, it says Krogan and his colleagues — who are in the Bay Area, which is now under a lockdown — hope to post a preprint of their work later this week that includes a list of these promising candidates.
"Whoever is capable of trying them, please try them," Krogan says.