The drug for the treatment of alcohol dependence disulfiram can be used as a treatment for COVID-19, a study showed, specialists from Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital.
The work was motivated by promising observations of the effect of disulfiram in biochemical and cellular screenings, as well as in experiments in mice.
The researchers used computational techniques to analyze a large database of medical records from the National Veterans Affairs System. The analysis included 944 thousand patients who underwent at least one test for SARS-CoV-2 between February 2020 and February 2021. Of these, 2,233 patients were prescribed disulfiram for alcoholism. Veterans who took disulfiram had a 34% lower incidence of SARS-CoV-2 than those who did not. Moreover, none of the infected in the disulfiram group died.
It is interesting that Russian scientists were the first to pay attention to disulfiram. Last summer, a group of chemists from the Higher School of Economics and the Institute of Organic Chemistry. N. D. Zelinsky RAS, using molecular modeling, discovered that disulfiram can also be used to combat SARS-CoV-2. An article about the discovery was published in the July issue of Mendeleev Communications magazine.
Today, the study of the mechanism of action of this drug is still in the process, the head of the basic department of organic chemistry of the Institute of Organic Chemistry named after I.I. N. D. Zelinsky Russian Academy of Sciences at the Higher School of Economics Igor Svitanko.
Read more in the exclusive material from Izvestia:
Sober calculation: alcoholism drug reduces risk of death from COVID
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