A team of researchers at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recently discovered compounds that may be useful for stopping the Zika virus.
The new compounds are able to stop Zika virus replication. In turn, this can decrease the damage that the virus causes as it kills brain cells.
Researchers found two classes of compounds with NCATS’ drug-repurposing screen robots. One of these compounds is antiviral while the other stops the virus from killing brain cells.
“Using the NCATS drug-repurposing platform for emerging infectious diseases can help rapidly identify potential treatments for urgent needs such as the Zika virus,” Dr. Wei Zheng, NCATS researcher, said. “While identifying promising compounds is a first step, our goal at NCATS is to facilitate the translation of these findings for evaluation in the clinic. The release of all the compound screening data in this publication and in the public PubChem database opens the door to the research community to do just that.”
Now the compounds are available to be studied by the worldwide research community. The goal is to help fight the current Zika public health crisis happening around the world.
“The Zika virus poses a global health threat,” Dr. Anton Simeonov, NCATS scientific director, said. “While we await the development of effective vaccines, which can take a significant amount of time, our identification of repurposed small molecule compounds may accelerate the translational process of finding a potential therapy.”
