Hopkins C, Onweni C, Zambito V, Fairweather D, McCormick K, Ebihara H, Caulfield T, Zhang YS, Freeman WD. Platforms for Personalized Polytherapeutics Discovery in COVID-19.
J Mol Biol 2021;
433:166945. [PMID:
33753053 PMCID:
PMC7979270 DOI:
10.1016/j.jmb.2021.166945]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/15/2020] [Revised: 03/09/2021] [Accepted: 03/10/2021] [Indexed: 12/18/2022]
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.
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