(Fighting New Coronary Pneumonia) "Nature" latest paper: Does not support the use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat new coronary pneumonia
China News Service, Beijing, July 23 (Reporter Sun Zifa) The internationally renowned academic journal "Nature" has recently published two medical research papers evaluating the antiviral activity of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine. It is pointed out that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are effective in rhesus monkeys or human lung cells. The new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) infection has no obvious antiviral effect. Taken together, these two studies do not support the use of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine to treat patients with new coronary pneumonia (COVID-19) infection.
The paper stated that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are commonly used to treat malaria, and there have been more than 80 registered clinical trials investigating their potential to treat new coronary pneumonia. Previous studies have found that these two drugs can inhibit new coronavirus infections in cell culture, but their therapeutic effects for patients with new coronary pneumonia infection have been controversial.
In the two newly published papers, the corresponding author of the paper, Roger Le Grand of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Roger Le Grand) and colleagues studied the therapeutic effect of hydroxychloroquine on cynomolgus monkeys, which are A non-human primate model that simulates human neocoronavirus infection. The results showed that hydroxychloroquine showed no significant antiviral activity regardless of whether treatment was started before, shortly after, or after a long period of time. In addition, the combination of this antimalarial drug with the antibiotic azithromycin has no significant effect on the virus levels of cynomolgus monkeys.
The corresponding author of the paper in another study, Stefan Pöhlmann (Stefan P?hlmann) of the German Primate Research Center-Leibniz Primate Institute and his colleagues found that chloroquine affects the new crown in human lung cells. The virus has no antiviral activity. They explained that in previous experiments, the cells used to prove that chloroquine has a positive effect lacked an enzyme that is commonly found in lung cells and can promote the entry of new coronavirus into human lung cells. They also emphasized that studies evaluating the activity of new coronavirus drugs should use cell lines that mimic lung tissue. (Finish)