Lymphoma drug, pralatrexate outperforms remdesivir against COVID-19: Study

Researchers have found that pralatrexate, a chemotherapy drug developed to treat lymphoma has outperformed remdesivir against COVID-19 in lab settings, and could potentially be repurposed to treat the disease.

Experiments demonstrated that pralatrexate more strongly inhibited viral replication than remdesivir, said Haiping Zhang of the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology in Shenzhen, China.

Zhanh and his team screened 1,906 existing drugs for their potential ability to inhibit replication of SARS-CoV-2 by targeting a viral protein called RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRP).

The findings were published in open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology.

“However, this chemotherapy drug can prompt significant side effects and is used for people with terminal lymphoma, so immediate use for COVID-19 patients is not guaranteed. Still, the findings support the use of the new screening strategy to identify drugs that could be repurposed,” the researchers noted.