We need a change of course in

the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic

and to be able to counter the pandemics that may arrive in the future:

vaccines

have done a lot, but they are not enough on their own, and for this we need to set up banks of molecules potentially capable of fight viruses to search for new drugs.

This is the message that emerges from the

conference on the challenge of the pandemic

, organized in Rome by the

Accademia dei Lincei

and which brings together researchers from all over the world, such as the Nobel Prize in Chemistry Roger Kornberg of Stanford University, Yang Guang of the Shanghai University of Technology and Wolfgang Baumeister, of the German Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry.

Also present were representatives of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Italian Medicines Agency (Aifa).

"We have been experiencing the Covid-19 pandemic for three years, it is with us and has killed at least seven million people worldwide, with 30,000 deaths a year in Italy. These data indicate that it is not possible to live with the SarsCoV2 virus", said the conference coordinator

Ernesto Carafoli

, of the Zurich Polytechnic and University of Padua and academic of the Lincei.

"It is true

that in a few months effective vaccines have been produced

and which have been fundamental in protecting against the pandemic, but we

continue to witness the onset of variants

and this has not allowed the virus to be eradicated, leading to coexistence with its attenuated form" , Carafoli said again.

"

.

If the Omicron that is currently circulating is less aggressive, this - observed the expert - means that the virus is sleeping, but there is nothing that can prevent it from mutating into a more aggressive form.

Thinking about living with the virus is a mistake, a half-defeat: the virus must be completely eradicated

.

Therefore

, according to Carafoli,

a new approach based on new generation drugs is

needed, which do not target the virus, but the proteins of human cells which are essential for the virus to cause infection.

"They are proteins that do not mutate and choosing them as a target requires a great deal of effort, starting with the involvement of bioinformatics", said the expert, for whom it would be advisable to develop "coded combinatorial libraries of DNA", i.e. libraries of " molecules with a potential antiviral capacity, like a sort of drug bank", Banks of potential drugs already exist for some diseases and now, he concluded, it is a question of developing new ones to "help counter future pandemics as well".