Abstract
Viral infections are one of the leading causes in human mortality and disease. Broad-spectrum antiviral drugs are a powerful weapon against new and re-emerging viruses. However, viral resistance to existing broad-spectrum antivirals remains a challenge, which demands development of new broad-spectrum therapeutics. In this report, we showed that fludarabine, a fluorinated purine analogue, effectively inhibited infection of RNA viruses, including Zika virus, Severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome virus, and Enterovirus A71, with all IC50 values below 1 µM in Vero, BHK21, U251 MG, and HMC3 cells. We observed that fludarabine has shown cytotoxicity to these cells only at high doses indicating it could be safe for future clinical use if approved. In conclusion, this study suggests that fludarabine could be developed as a potential broad-spectrum anti-RNA virus therapeutic agent.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 774 |
| Journal | Viruses |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - May 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Funding: This research was funded by the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province of China (BK20190307 to Y.Y.) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81971923 to Z.X.).
Funding Information:
This research was funded by the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province of China (BK20190307 to Y.Y.) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81971923 to Z.X.). We thank all the staffs at Translational Medicine Core facilities of Medical School of Nanjing University for their contribution to this study. We thank Jinghong Wen in Nankai University for drawing the chemical structure formula in Figure 1.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
Keywords
- Antiviral drugs
- Enterovirus A71
- Fludarabine
- Severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome virus
- Zika virus
