Cambridge scientists have grown beating heart cells in the lab and shown how they are vulnerable to SARS-CoV-2 infection. In a study published in Communications Biology, they used this system to show that an experimental peptide drug called DX600 can prevent the virus entering the heart cells.
Genes that play an important role in allowing SARS-CoV-2 to invade heart cells become more active with age, according to research published today in the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology.
Repurposing existing medicines focused on known drug targets is likely to offer a more rapid hope of tackling COVID-19 than developing and manufacturing a vaccine, argue an international team of scientists in the British Journal of Pharmacology.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge, in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh, have shown how a radioactive agent developed in the 1960s to detect bone cancer can be re-purposed to highlight the build-up of unstable calcium deposits in arteries, a process that can cause heart attack and stroke.
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