The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically affected the population worldwide, with over 600 million confirmed cases and 7 million deaths to date. Although vaccines provide protection to healthy people, they could be ineffective for immune compromised individuals or those bearing some pathological conditions. Moreover, mutations could generate viral variants unaffected by currently available vaccines. Therefore, new therapeutic agents are urgently needed for the treatment of SARS-CoV-2 in order to reduce virus dissemination and incidence of serious clinical complications in the population. Molecular hybridization, resulting from a covalent combination of two or more pharmacophore units, has emerged as a promising approach to treat complex diseases and has also been explored for the design of new drugs for Covid-19 treatment. ISOF researchers have now published an overview on small molecule hybrids from both natural products and synthetic sources reported recently in the literature with a potential antiviral activity toward SARS-CoV-2. Among others, some dihydroartemisinin-urodeoxycholic bile acid hybrids designed and synthetized by ISOF researchers in collaboration with the University of Ferrara, known to display anticancer activities, have successfully been repurposed as potential antiviral candidates for the treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Full article:
Insights into SARS-CoV-2: Small-Molecule Hybrids for COVID-19 Treatment
Maria Luisa Navacchia, Caterina Cinti, Elena Marchesi, Daniela Perrone
Molecules 2024, 29, 5403