Cancer drug derived from sea squirts outperforms remdesivir in COVID-19 preclinical models

The search among existing drugs for potential COVID-19 treatments has pointed to another promising candidate—a cancer drug that appears to perform better than Gilead Sciences’ FDA-approved remdesivir against the SARS-CoV-2 virus behind the disease.

In a new study published in Science, researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the University of California, San Francisco found in preclinical experiments that Spanish drugmaker PharmaMar’s plitidepsin, approved under the brand name Aplidin in some countries for multiple myeloma, was almost 30 times more potent than remdesivir.