Anti-parasitic drug, Ivermectin, eliminates SARS-CoV-2 in cell cultures in lab | Hacker News Reader

Anti-parasitic drug, Ivermectin, eliminates SARS-CoV-2 in cell cultures in lab

monash.edu

50 pointsoriggm40 comments

This headline is somewhat misleading; just changing to the wording of "cell cultures" instead of "cells" would make the stage that this work is in more clear.

It's absolutely misleading and dangerous.

Emailing the mods with the footer Contact link will help them realize and correct that.

This is true in the sense that all misleading medical information about over-the-counter drugs is dangerous.

It's also true because we already know of at least one person who died self-dosing with an unproven Covid-19 "cure".

Hypochlorous acid (bleach) destroys SARS-CoV-2 in cell culture, too. So do ethanol and soap.

A revolver destroys the virus in-vivo. (At least vivo at the beginning of the study.)

That xkcd comic confuses me. Does a revolver really kill pathogens or does it just scatter them?

A flamethrower, on the other hand...

This sort of anti-hype is not useful. I've seen a number of people say such things recently, so I figure it might be worth correcting, sarcasm notwithstanding.

First, yes, ingesting large amounts of bleach would likely be hazardous to one's health. The article that was linked suggests that there is a drug which is FDA approved, and used in a therapeutic context today, which may also be effective at least in vitro against the new SARS virus. It's not "haha bleach," or aggressive pulverizing, or any other dramatic form of cell death you can easily imagine. It's a drug [that was linked].

Second, bleach actually _is_ used in vivo. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5402722/

Do you have a citation?

Changed now. Thanks!

This one of those effective outside the human body tests that have a long way to go. We shall see.

But I mainly commented to say that it worked well on my scabies years ago. Good for keeping your guinea pigs parasite free too.

Yes. Title should better reflect the current stage of the drug (pre-trial).

Ivermectin is approved by the FDA, but not (yet?) for treating COVID-19, and not at the doses shown to stop the virus in experimental conditions. The dose shown to be effective against COVID-19 is much much higher than the dosage approved by the FDA for other purposes.

What is the dose needed to treated to COVID. I'm assuming it would have to be continued for at least 5 days and dosed multiple times daily. Normally ivermectin is dosed as a single dose 0.2mg/kg (so 14mg for an average 70kg person) for treating, say scabies.

This episode [0] of "This Week In Virology" describes in detail the pharmacokinetics of Ivermectin and the issues with this study.

[0] https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-599/

I would be surprised if the dose would have to be "much, much" higher. When treating lice or scabies you need to give patient so much that a significant amount is eliminate through the skin. Enough to kill complex multicellular organisms. If I recall, the primary method of elimination of ivermectin is via the liver in the stool (and not via the skin). I wouldn't expect a dose of Ivermectin used to fight COVID to be higher than the dose used to fight, say, scabies. However it would make sense that you would have to take multiple doses over a much longer time to maintain a steady state in the blood stream.

from the paper: "..no toxicity was observed with ivermectin at any of the concentrations tested....

Ivermectin has an established safety profile for human use and is FDA approved for a number of parasitic infections1, Importantly, recent reviews and meta analysis indicate that high dose ivermectin has comparable safety as the standard low-dose treatment, although there is not enough evidence to make conclusions about the safety profile in pregnancy.

The critical next step in further evaluation for possible benefit in COVID patients will be to examine a multiple addition dosing regimen that mimics the current approved usage of ivermectin in humans. As noted, ivermectin was the focus of a recent phase III clinical trial in dengue patients in Thailand, in which a single daily dose was found to be safe but did not produce any clinical benefit. However, the investigators noted that an improved dosing regimen might be developed, based on pharmacokinetic data. Although DENV is clearly very different to SARS-CoV-2, this trial design should inform future work going forward. Altogether the current report, combined with a known-safety profile, demonstrates that ivermectin is worthy of further consideration as a possible SARS-CoV-2 antiviral. "

Years ago a friend invited me to help him brand his cattle. We rounded 'em up and sent each through a chute where we applied a dose of ivermectin to their back. The procedure was: measure, pour directly on their back and then spread it around with bare hands. We did this for an indeterminate number of cattle. He seemed unconcerned that _we_ were getting quite a dose through our skin too.

This friend has lived a remarkably healthy life - he was over 70, never got sick, and could toss hay bales with the best of them. Seeing how Ivermectin is applied, I'm fairly certain there wasn't (and isn't) a single parasite in his body, in his clothes, his pickup truck or his mobile home.

In vitro things usually work out pretty well, but as soon as you hit human trials it becomes really difficult. Hydroxochloroquine worked well against covid in vitro (had a lower toxicity than remdesivir) but turned out that it could be fatal with certain diabetes drugs and actually increased ventilator time needed.

Given the age of hydroxochloroquine, how was it not previously known that it had negative interactions with diabetes drugs?

Source? HCQ has been used for a long time. It is a medication that is usually ordered for chronic conditions. So people might be expected to be on HCQ for YEARS. (Unlike COVID were they could be on the same doses for just days.) It has a well documented side effect profile and drug interact profile known well before COVID came onto the scene.

Et voila: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.31.018556v1.... Also here's a source on the ventilator time: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8b2govfsa6n0xbq/NEJM_Clinical%20Ou...

Interesting but not sure how generalizable a study on genetically modified mice is. I threw HCQ and metformin into the Epocrates drug interaction checker and this is what I got back, "Monitor glucose: combo may incr. risk of hypoglycemia, including life-threatening (additive effects)"

I find it strange that this would be a new discovery, considering that even a casual search shows a decently large body of research specifically into the combinations of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine with metformin.

"Confidential: Destroy when review is complete" A look behind the curtain.

Yep. Ding ding ding! Tried to post this link onto hn but it couldn't accept for some reason. This was a leaked paper submitted to NEJM.

> It has a well documented side effect profile and drug interact profile known well before COVID came onto the scene.

You could have said the same about using aspirin to treat the flu, which we now know can be very dangerous[1].

Drugs also "interact" with diseases, leading to different (side) effects in patients with that disease than without it.

1. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/reyes-syndrom...

Why did you ask for a source while simultaneously making claims without sources? The drug is being falsely pushed by the deranged leader of the United States, I would be much more suspicious of you then of anyone claiming to be wary of it. Especially after Dr. Fauci himself told everyone on national television to not get there hopes up about it.

HCQ is already widely used against COVID-19 around the world.

And yet deaths still keep going up. Usage is not a metric for effectiveness.

It's a treatment, not a cure. Deaths go up because more people are getting infected.

Please leave politics out of this. The OP was making very specific claims and I asked for the sources, which he provided. I thought it was common knowledge that HCQ is most often prescribed for chronic conditions (but I could be wrong about that). It is fair to ask for a source though so here is a source. https://reference.medscape.com/drug/plaquenil-hydroxychloroq... Note that for treatment of, say, Rheumatoid Arthritis the treatment duration is indefinite. The suggested dose for off label use of HCQ with covid is a single dose of 800mg, then 4 to 7 days of 400 mg. (That is from the Epocrates app on my phone so I don't have a link to share.)

honksillet says>"The suggested dose for off label use of HCQ with covid is a single dose of 800mg, then 4 to 7 days of 400 mg. "<

800 MG HCQ seems high. Dr. Zev Zelenko (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ulqf5NXhms) suggested a regimen for covid-19 with only half that dosage:

- 200mg 2x daily Hydroxychloroquine,

- 500mg 1x daily Azithromycin,

- 220mg 1x daily Zinc sulfate.

This is dangerous. Don't take advice from Youtube celebrity doctors.

Yea in vitro you can just douse the virus in bleach and you’re all done.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22782980

So does bleach. Neither one is a proven treatment for COVID-19 in vivo though.

Almost all in vitro (i.e. in a Petri dish) results are of limited value. A lot of things kill viruses in vitro, including air and water, but aren't actually treatments inside people. Until they do at minimum a phase 1 trial (to show basic safety) and have even draft results showing efficacy, I'd hold off on assuming this is relevant to the discussion /at all/.

I'm pretty sure "heavy fire" can kill cell cultures in lab too.

To paraphrase XKCD [1], a handgun also eliminates SARS-CoV-2 in cells.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1217/

And in people as well

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