A supercomputer used by scientists to determine ways to combat the coronavirus outbreak has reportedly identified 77 drugs that could potentially help stop the spread.
Researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory published results this week from a project that enlisted the help of an IBM supercomputer named Summit, which helped identify the most effective existing drugs that could potentially combat the coronavirus.
The research focuses on the method the coronavirus uses to cling to cells via a spike protein. Summit used an algorithm to determine which drugs could bind to the protein and prevent the virus from doing what it wants.
“Summit was needed to rapidly get the simulation results we needed. It took us a day or two whereas it would have taken months on a normal computer,” Jeremy Smith, one of the co-authors of the research, said in a statement.
“Our results don’t mean that we have found a cure or treatment for the coronavirus. We are very hopeful, though, that our computational findings will both inform future studies and provide a framework that experimentalists will use to further investigate these compounds. Only then will we know whether any of them exhibit the characteristics needed to mitigate this virus,” he said.
Nearly 600 people in the United States have been killed by the coronavirus, and almost 50,000 have been infected.
Researchers across the country have been scrambling to find ways to treat the virus, including testing longtime malaria treatments that have shown some anecdotal promise in fighting this outbreak.
President Trump has been a strong advocate of experimental treatments, including anti-malaria drugs.
Pres. Trump touts chloroquine, an old malaria drug, that doctors say may help treat novel coronavirus, claims it will be available “almost immediately.”
Read more about chloroquine: https://t.co/cYt0fxdlfB pic.twitter.com/9oPsMSD3HV
— ABC News (@ABC) March 19, 2020
