Penn Medicine News – Penn Commentary Highlights Potential for Existing Drugs Like Statins As Promising COVID-19 Treatments

Posted On: August 23, 2020

by Melissa Moody, Senior Science Communications Officer

New data suggest statins as a potentially helpful class of drugs to fight COVID-19, and pointing to that study, two researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania propose a framework for a systematic approach to drug repurposing for the novel coronavirus. Their commentary published today in Cell Metabolism.

“I prescribe statins to patients with high cholesterol very often—these medications are safe, affordable and widely available. To be able to use a drug with this long history of safety, that is relatively cheap and that is already in production around the world, compared to the time and cost it takes to develop entirely new drugs, would be a major step forward in treating this virus,” said Daniel Rader, MD, chair of Genetics and associate director of Penn’s Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics.

Earlier this month, Xiao-Jing Zhang and colleagues reported the first large observational study of statin use among 13,981 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in Hubei Province, China in Cell Metabolism, and they found the risk for 28-day all-cause mortality was 5.2 percent in the statin group and 9.4 percent in the non-statin group.

Rader and co-author David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc, an assistant professor of Translational Medicine & Human Genetics and director of the Center for Cytokine Storm Treatment & Laboratory (CSTL), an assistant professor of Translational Medicine & Human Genetics and director of the Center for Cytokine Storm Treatment & Laboratory (CSTL), suggest there are several possible ways in which statins could be helpful in COVID-19 patients. In COVID-19, the host’s immune system must mount an effective response to control the virus but avoid responding too aggressively and inducing a ‘cytokine storm,’ which poses the greatest risk of death. This has led to great interest in medicines that could potentially limit immune hyperactivation, of which statins are one. Another potential mechanism of action of statins in COVID-19 could be through inhibiting SARS-CoV-2 entry into cells by binding the main protease. It is also possible that these results were due to some confounding factor and that statins are not effective in COVID-19.

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