Covid-19 roundup: Gilead touts pre­clin­i­cal promise for oral remde­sivir; Roche pre­pares for virus to be­come en­dem­ic

With remde­sivir still stand­ing as the on­ly an­tivi­ral ap­proved to treat Covid-19, Gilead has been ex­plor­ing new ways to ex­pand its use. Now its re­searchers, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with a team from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Car­oli­na in Chapel Hill, have come up with pre­clin­i­cal re­sults back­ing up an oral can­di­date.

And they have their sights set be­yond Covid-19.

GS-621763, a pro­drug of the parental nu­cle­o­side of remde­sivir, ap­peared promis­ing in both in vit­ro ex­per­i­ments in cell cul­tures and in vi­vo ex­per­i­ments in­volv­ing mice. No­tably, the sci­en­tists al­so com­pared GS-621763 against Mer­ck’s mol­nupi­ravir, an­oth­er oral nu­cle­o­side ana­log an­tivi­ral cur­rent­ly be­ing test­ed in hu­mans, and found both drugs to be “sim­i­lar­ly ef­fi­ca­cious.”

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