No mention of Apabetalone,but I am pasting it to see if our science brains can figure out if there is any hope for RVX here.

Scientists have discovered new drugs that could be repurposed to treat coronavirus, including over-the-counter medicines for allergies and coughs and a cancer treatment, in a pioneering project examining how the virus interacts with the human body. 

In a paper published in the medical journal Nature on Thursday, researchers from University of California, San Francisco, and their colleagues in New York and Paris, identified treatments to be tested against Covid-19. 

The academics have narrowed down an initial list of 69 potential drugs, which are already on the market, to groups targeting two interactions between the virus and the human cells it hijacks. The researchers are in talks with pharmaceuticals companies including Roche about conducting clinical trials on the most promising candidates.

Nevan Krogan, director of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute at UCSF that led the project, said it was “a paradigm shift” to go from the discovery of a new virus to understanding how drugs could tackle it within the space of just three months. “It is a new way of doing drug discovery,” he said. 

One group includes hydroxychloroquine, the antimalarial drug that President Donald Trump touted as a game-changer. The researchers have shown how it works in the body for the first time — but they also showed why it causes significant side-effects in some patients, such as cardiac problems. 

“It’s actually very dirty. It hits a bunch of other targets”, including a heart receptor, Mr Krogan said.

Importantly, other drugs were found that target the same interaction but appeared to have fewer side-effects. These include clemastine, an allergy medicine marketed as Dayhist in the US and Tavegil in the UK; the cough suppressant cloperastine; and the antipsychotic drug haloperidol. The team also discovered signs that a compound that has never made it to market — known as PB28 — may also work.

The second group includes the cancer drug Plitidepsin, which the Spanish biotech company PharmaMar announced this week it had regulatory permission to test in clinical trials for Covid-19. 

But the scientists also found a drug that encourages the replication of the virus: an ingredient in many cough medicines called dextromethorphan, which may lead to doctors advising against using them if Covid-19 is suspected. The Quantitative Biosciences Institute Covid-19 Research Group uses a novel approach to finding drugs. Viruses cannot replicate without their hosts. So instead of searching for drugs that target the virus, they looked for those that target the human proteins it needs to reproduce. They studied the 29 genes of coronavirus — and then mapped the more than 300 proteins in the human body that they interact with. Then they looked for drugs that were already used to target these proteins. 

The seeds of the collaboration were sown more than a decade ago when Mr Krogan and Brian Shoichet, a chemistry professor at UCSF, met in a stadium box at a baseball game in San Francisco, while watching the local team the Giants. Four years ago they combined more than 20 labs to form the Quantitative Biosciences Institute.

“The big breakthrough for me was the fact we could use these maps and make immediate predictions about drugs,” Mr Krogan said.

When coronavirus started to spread, the institute used its modelling technique to develop the long list of 69 drugs. It partnered with the Mount Sinai health network in New York and Institut Pasteur in Paris to test the drugs against the live virus, narrowing the group of drug candidates.  After that they spread the net even wider, shipping boxes filled with the genes they had isolated and cloned from the virus to more than 300 labs in 38 countries — relying so heavily on their FedEx delivery man that they put him in the acknowledgments of the scientific paper. More than a hundred scientists regularly gather on Zoom calls to exchange notes. 

Ron Conway, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, has known Mr Krogan since the Giants game where the scientists met in his box. He has been trying to raise $10m for the project from his “Rolodex” of other technology leaders. So far he has raised $5m, including his own donation. 

“The beauty of this project is that whatever therapeutic works, it is out there and we just need to make more of it,” Mr Conway said. 

Mr Krogan said the teams were able to move much faster because they had “cut the lawyer crap”. He rejects what slows science down: they have not charged for the genes, they do not do the paperwork, and they co-operate rather than compete for prizes and publications. 

He hopes the “silver lining” of the crisis is that science will be conducted more speedily in the future. “Why aren’t we doing this all the time? Why aren’t we doing this on HIV or breast cancer or Parkinson’s?”