People who are unlikely to develop severe COVID-19 have no widely approved medications to ease the illness
A shift is afoot in the search for COVID-19 therapies: some researchers are turning their attention towards drugs that could be used to treat mild illness, even in people who are not at high risk of severe disease.
The cupboard is bare The World Health Organization recommends more than a half-dozen COVID-19 drugs for people who either have severe disease or are at risk of hospitalization. The WHO cautions against several drugs as treatments for mild illness — but makes no recommendations of what to take instead.
Not just a luxury Immunologist Marc Feldmann at the University of Oxford, UK, points to another benefit: researchers don’t fully understand the risk factors that lead to severe disease. Widely used treatments for mild disease could save the lives of people who do not know that they are at high risk. “The reality is that everybody is at risk,” he said.
Although ACTIV-6 tests repurposed drugs, Feldmann and his colleagues think a new type of antiviral could treat mild COVID-19. Most viruses need sugar molecules to take on their 3D shapes, and they use their hosts’ biochemical machinery to mould these molecules into a usable form. Modified sugars called iminosugars can gum up this machinery and disrupt the formation of viral particles.
Drug barriers But there are barriers to finding drugs for mild disease. Among them are treatment guidelines ― published by organizations such as the WHO ― that focus on severe disease, says Edward Mills, a health researcher at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada.
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