India-Made 2DG drug shown to treat heart damage caused by Covid
India-Made 2DG drug shown to treat heart damage caused by Covid
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A team of US scientist students has identified how a specific protein in Covid-19 damages heart tissue and they used a drug, at present in emergency use for the treatment of coronavirus in India, to reverse the toxic effects of that protein on the heart.

2-deoxy-D-glucose (2DG) was commercially announced last year by Dr Reddy's Laboratories to treat Covid-19. In cooperation with Dr Reddy's Laboratories (DRL), Hyderabad, the Defence Research and Development Organization's (DRDO) Institute of Nuclear Medicine & Allied Sciences (INMAS) created 2DG.

The harmful effects of that protein on the heart have now been reversed by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine's (UMSOM) Center for Precision Disease using 2DG.

Fortunately, 2DG is affordable, often used in laboratory research, and is being employed in clinical studies in India, said the researchers. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not yet approved the drug to treat the condition.

Senior researcher, Zhe Han, Professor of Medicine and Director of the Center for Precision Disease Modelling at UMSOM, said "Our research demonstrates that individual SARS-CoV-2 proteins can each do major damage to specific tissues in the body, similar to what has been found for other viruses like HIV and Zika."

By pinpointing the mechanisms causing damage to each tissue, Han said, "we can test drugs to determine if any may undo this harm; those that show promise can then be further investigated in clinical research trials.

Their results, which were based on studies using mouse heart cells and fruit flies, were released in the Nature journal Communications Biology.

In investigations using fruit flies and human cells last year, Dr. Han and his research group were able to pinpoint the SARS-CoV-2 proteins that were the most harmful.

They discovered a potential medication called selinexor that decreased the toxicity of one of these proteins, called Nsp6, but not the other one.

Using the medication 2-DG, the scientists prevented the metabolism of sugar in fruit flies and mouse heart cells. They discovered that the medication lessened the harm the Nsp6 viral protein did to the heart and mitochondria.

We anticipate that this medication, which restores the metabolism of the heart to its pre-infection state, will harm the virus by severing its energy source and removing the components necessary for its replication.

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