Cholesterol-lowering drug makes virus ‘just like a cold’

A CHOLESTEROL-LOWERING drug could make coronavirus no more lethal than a common cold.

Researchers at New York’s Mount Sinai Medical Center looked at depriving the nutrients which Covid-19 needs to survive and found that fat which accumulates inside lung cells is a key component of what the virus needs to reproduce.

Depriving the virus of these conditions could mean that the virus can be better controlled, with the researchers saying it could be reduced to something as severe as the common cold.

“By understanding how the SarsCoV-2 controls our metabolism, we can wrestle back control from the virus and deprive it from the very resources it needs to survive,” said Professor Yaakov Nahmias from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

“With second-wave infections spiking in countries across the globe, these findings couldn’t come at a better time.

If our findings are borne out by clinical studies, this course of treatment could potentially downgrade Covid-19’s severity into nothing worse than a common cold.”

During the study, which was previewed by the Cell Press, scientists screened medications that could interfere with the virus’ ability to reproduce. They found that one cholesterol-lowering drug, Fenofibrate, showed promising results which allowed lung cells to burn more fat and therefore depriving coronavirus of the conditions it needed.

After five days of treatment with the drug, the researchers said that the virus had almost completely disappeared in lab studies.

Another study published by Cambridge University Press this week found that three in four coronavirus deaths in China had at least one underlying health condition. Over 40 per cent of those had high blood pressure, and over a quarter had heart disease – conditions both linked to high cholesterol.