Acta Pharmaceutica Sinica B (Sep 2021)

Repurposing carrimycin as an antiviral agent against human coronaviruses, including the currently pandemic SARS-CoV-2

  • Haiyan Yan,
  • Jing Sun,
  • Kun Wang,
  • Huiqiang Wang,
  • Shuo Wu,
  • Linlin Bao,
  • Weiqing He,
  • Dong Wang,
  • Airu Zhu,
  • Tian Zhang,
  • Rongmei Gao,
  • Biao Dong,
  • Jianrui Li,
  • Lu Yang,
  • Ming Zhong,
  • Qi Lv,
  • Feifei Qin,
  • Zhen Zhuang,
  • Xiaofang Huang,
  • Xinyi Yang,
  • Yuhuan Li,
  • Yongsheng Che,
  • Jiandong Jiang

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 11, no. 9
pp. 2850 – 2858

Abstract

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COVID-19 pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection severely threatens global health and economic development. No effective antiviral drug is currently available to treat COVID-19 and any other human coronavirus infections. We report herein that a macrolide antibiotic, carrimycin, potently inhibited the cytopathic effects (CPE) and reduced the levels of viral protein and RNA in multiple cell types infected by human coronavirus 229E, OC43, and SARS-CoV-2. Time-of-addition and pseudotype virus infection studies indicated that carrimycin inhibited one or multiple post-entry replication events of human coronavirus infection. In support of this notion, metabolic labelling studies showed that carrimycin significantly inhibited the synthesis of viral RNA. Our studies thus strongly suggest that carrimycin is an antiviral agent against a broad-spectrum of human coronaviruses and its therapeutic efficacy to COVID-19 is currently under clinical investigation.

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