Platforms for Personalized Polytherapeutics Discovery in COVID-19.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic entered its third and most intense to date wave of infections in November 2020. This perspective article describes how combination therapies (polytherapeutics) are a needed focus for helping battle the severity of complications from SARS-CoV-2 infection. It outlines the types of systems that are needed for fast and efficient combinatorial assessment of therapeutic candidates. Proposed are micro-physiological systems using human iPSC as a format for tissue-specific modeling of infection, the use of gene-humanized zebrafish and C. elegans for combinatorial drug screens due to the animals being addressable in liquid multi-well formats, and the use of engineered pseudo-typing systems to safely model infection in the transgenic animals and engineered tissue systems.

• Authors: Christopher Hopkins, Chidinma Onweni, Victoria Zambito, DeLisa Fairweather, Kathryn McCormick, Hideki Ebihara, Thomas Caulfield, Yu Shrike Zhang, W David Freeman
• Journal: Journal of molecular biology (J Mol Biol) Vol. 433 Issue 10 Pg. 166945 (05 14 2021) ISSN: 1089-8638 [Electronic] Netherlands
• PMID: 33753053 (Publication Type: Journal Article, Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural, Review)
• Copyright: Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Topics

• Animals
• Animals, Genetically Modified
• COVID-19 (economics, genetics)
• Caenorhabditis elegans (drug effects, genetics)
• Disease Models, Animal
• Drug Evaluation, Preclinical (methods)
• Humans
• Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (drug effects)
• Zebrafish (genetics)
• COVID-19 Drug Treatment