On May 10, a new drug for the treatment of COVID-19 discovered by Chinese scientists was granted a national invention patent. The patent specification shows that 10uM (micromol/L) Cepharanthine inhibits the replication of coronavirus by 15393 times. This is exciting news for those in the midst of a pandemic!
What is COVID-19?
Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), referred to as "New Coronary Pneumonia", named by the World Health Organization as "2019 Coronavirus Disease", refers to pneumonia caused by the 2019 new coronavirus infection. On February 11, 2020, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced in Geneva, Switzerland, that pneumonia caused by the new coronavirus will be named "COVID-19". As of 18:00 CEST on May 12, there were 516,922,683 confirmed cases of new coronary pneumonia in the world, and a total of 6,259,945 deaths. On the 12th, there were 363,925 new confirmed cases of new coronary pneumonia and 1,373 new deaths worldwide.
History of Cepharanthine Covid Research
Since January 2020, Tong Yigang's team has screened thousands of drugs with a unique drug screening platform.
In February 2020, the first original discovery of Cepharanthine was found to have super anti-new coronavirus activity. The related paper published in March of the same year has now become a highly cited paper by ESI.
In April 2020, the team of Professor Takashi Wakida, director of Japan's National Institute of Infectious Diseases, published a paper confirming the effect of Cepharanthine against the new coronavirus.
From October 2020 to August 2021, several research teams published the research progress of Cepharanthine in anti-coronavirus in international journals.
An article published in the journal Science in July 2021 confirmed this conclusion: the researchers compared Cepharanthine with 25 other candidate compounds, and the results showed that the EC50 of Cepharanthine against the new coronavirus (causing the concentration of 50% maximum effect, the lower the number, the better) only 0.1uM, which is much lower than other candidate drugs.
On May 10, a new drug for the treatment of COVID-19 discovered by Chinese scientists was granted a national invention patent. The patent specification shows that 10uM (micromol/L) Cepharanthine inhibits the replication of coronavirus by 15393 times. This is exciting news for those in the midst of a pandemic!
Cepharanthine can be expected to bring us very big changes and may help us overcome the new crown epidemic as soon as possible! However, further research is needed on the clinical trial studies of Cepharanthine and the specific methods and techniques of use. Let's look forward to the end of COVID-19 as soon as possible!
Reference: Science and Technology Daily / 2022 / May / 13 / Edition 001
