Researchers at Rutgers University are developing a new oral COVID-19 treatment, Jun12682, which has shown potential in animal studies to supplement or replace Paxlovid. This novel drug targets a key viral protein and does not interfere with other medications, offering significant advantages over current treatments.
“COVID-19 remains the nation’s third leading cause of death, so there’s already a massive need for additional treatment options,” said Jun Wang, senior author of the study and an associate professor who runs a research lab at Rutgers’ Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy. “That need will grow more urgent when, inevitably, COVID-19 mutates in ways that prevent Paxlovid from working.
Precise knowledge of PLpro’s structure enabled Wang’s team to design and synthesize 85 drug candidates that would bond to“The PLpro crystal structures showed an unexpected arrangement of how the drug candidate molecules bind to its protein target, leading to innovative design ideas implemented by professor Wang’s medicinal chemistry team,” said Eddy Arnold, who is a professor at CABM and the Rutgers Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.
“Our treatment was about as effective in mice as Paxlovid was in its initial animal tests,” said Wang, who added the experimental drug appears to have at least one major advantage over the older drug.