This anti-parasitic drug used since 1980s may help stop coronavirus. Australian researchers at Monash University in Melbourne have found that Ivermectin - an FDA approved anti-parasitic drug which is already available around the world kills the virus within 48 hours, said in a study published on Friday in the journal Antiviral Research.
Dr. Kylie Wagstaff, a team leader said, "Ivermectin is very widely used and seen as a safe drug. We need to figure out now whether the dosage you can use it at in humans will be effective—that's the next step."
"We found that even a single dose could essentially remove all viral RNA by 48 hours and that even at 24 hours there was a really significant reduction in it," she added.
Ivermectin is an FDA-approved anti-parasitic drug that has also been shown to be effective in vitro against a broad range of viruses including HIV, Dengue, Influenza and Zika virus.
However, Dr. Wagstaff cautioned that the tests conducted in the study were in vitro, meaning it was in a Petri dish at a lab and that trials is needed to be carried out in people.
“As the virologist who was part of the team who were first to isolate and share SARS-COV2 outside of China in January 2020, I am excited about the prospect of Ivermectin being used as a potential drug against COVID-19,” Leon Caly, senior medical scientist at the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory (VIDRL) at the Doherty Institute, said.
Dr Wagstaff made a previous breakthrough finding on Ivermectin in 2012 when she identified the drug and its antiviral activity with Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute's Professor David Jans, also an author on this paper. Professor Jans and his team have been researching Ivermectin for more than 10 years with different viruses.
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