Name: Inside the frantic race to find a drug to fight coronavirus
Uploaded: 2020-03-25T18:46:15.000Z
Duration: 7 min 34 s
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While cities across the world are shutting down to help stop the spread of Corona virus tonight, many of the best scientists in the world are busy at work.

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Find an existing drug that will treat Corona virus and there, hopefully days or weeks away.

Our own either Pilgrim was granted incredible access to this research and has more on the unprecedented worldwide effort underway right now.

A frantic fight under way too slow a global pandemic was still filed for wars.

But we don't stop file for for infections the effort to find a treatment for Corona virus crossing borders, creating an unprecedented international collaboration in San Francisco, California 900,000 people asked to shelter in place.

At the University of California, San Francisco, this is the front lines of around the clock fight against a silent killer.

It truly has been a race against the clock.

Nevin Kragen is director at the Quantitative Biosciences Institute.

He's on a critical mission, trying to discover if any FDA approved drugs can slow the Corona virus corner.

Byers can't exist by itself, needs our cells in order to survive, and it hijacks our proteins in a way that's beneficial for the virus.

So there's a lot of effort out there trying to develop drugs to target.

If the virus, which is great, we're taking a different approach.

How Corner virus hijacks and re wires the human cell during the course of infection.

Never and his team aren't focusing on the virus, but its host us.

We're looking at the human cells the virus needs on looking at FDA approved drugs that are available, Nevin found 29 proteins in the DNA of the virus and then followed the virus attack to find which of our more than 20,000 proteins it interacts with that information critical, narrowing down for scientists.

How many of these proteins have previously approved drugs that can target them, obviously, for other diseases?

This isn't the first map Grogan's team has created.

In 2011 he mapped HIV than Ebola West Now and Den Game.

In this case, he's hoping the map helped.

Science is figure out a treatment for Corona virus that works now.

I think it takes an average of at least six years in order to come up with a drug.

But if we can, you are to use drugs that exist for other diseases and repurpose Um, we may have drugs that we could be using right now.

Von Schau Kat, who works in a nearby San Francisco lab show.

Kat has been working on discovering drugs to help cancer and Parkinson's patients.

He's now working nonstop on Corona virus.

Everybody else is looking at a list of 20,000 proteins.

We can look at a list of 200 so to pick the 200 out of 20,000 and to focus on those this is really trying accelerate things.

By year's show, Cod says he's found about 60 drugs 10 which are already FDA approved, that interact with the same proteins as the virus, is still looking for more.

The map and those 10 drugs have been shipped across the world to two labs that contest the live virus, the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

We here have the expertise and the ability to grow the virus, quantify it on test Drugs Against and New York Smelt Sinai Hospital.

He's created vaccines before his most recognizable discovery, the flu mist.

But right now he's focused on Nevins map, and if any drugs will help slow this pandemic, we get the results in one week and then depending on what day that we have that we were moving to animal models on See How Adolfo, his wife, also works in a different lab, Ana Fernandez says.

Everybody volunteer is like because we really have to prioritize right now.

While Adolfo studies the effect on animals and looks at the viral invasion in people, we gain time.

Basically, by not trying to reinvent the wheel, we're really trying to kind of you realize what we already have, what we already know.

These scientists, just part of the hundreds in laps around the world, working together in this new normal of social distancing, communicating using a shared folder for information, video teleconferencing daily via zoom to share findings.

It's basically 24 hours a day off, you know, data flying back and forth.

There's 10 new emails and the lists of change.

This road map, while confusing to the untrained eye, offers these brilliant minds some direction on how to get to a treatment and surprising them, giving them information about how the virus attacks.

Scientists didn't expect to find some of the proteins in the list.

They don't make sense, you know, like, why would this protein Why would the virus use this protein?

We think that protein is involved in something that we've never thought viruses used, but a lot of our human proteins, they moonlight, they'd have the function we know about.

Maybe the virus co opted that the search for so many other important scientific answers put on hold as the scientists worked to find an answer to curb this pandemic.

Urgency is making us realize we need to collaborate, and I truly believe it's the collaborations we've put in place.

That arm is really making this move at a speed that hasn't existed before.

And I also want to say I think we're changing the paradigm of how to do science.

It's the chance toe have an impact on something that is a worldwide public health crisis.

Kragen hopes to have the roadmap posted online by the end of the week for all scientists to see and use his hope.

This unprecedented team effort will flatten the curve.

Hopefully, the scientific community will be able to look at our map, look at our predictions, maybe make new predictions about what's therapies or which drugs could be used to fight this fires.

In the short term, I would say that there's a, you know, probably a 2% chance that we could identify a drug that is FDA approved.

And maybe it would be well enough, understood that it could be used in patients in, you know, a month that would be the fastest of the fastest.

That would be almost a miracle sciences, brightest minds teaming up on this moon shot with real potential to save so many lives.

We are certainly cheering on the scientific community.

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