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Whilescientists around the world continue work towardsafe and effective COVID-19 vaccines,others are also focused ondrugs and treatments that couldhelptame the disease.
And it’s not just pharmaceutical companies working on therapies. A 14-year-old girl from the U.S. state of Texas thinks she may have come up with a solution.
CGTN’s Hendrik Sybrandy reports.
For a while now, Anika Chebrolu has been fascinated by viruses, pandemics and vaccines. So perhaps it was only natural that the ninth grader from Frisco, Texas, parlayed that interest at the 3M Young Scientist Challenge, held virtually this year amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“We want to find the best possible therapies and effective cures to combat this virus because of the immense number of cases and deaths across the world,” Chebrolu said in a recent Zoom interview.
What began for her as a search for a treatment for the seasonal flu virus, inspired by research into the deadly 1918 pandemic, turned into a possible drug for the current disease.
“My project was about finding a molecule which can bind to the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and provide a potential antiviral against the COVID-19 pandemic,” Chebrolu said.
Her goal is to change the shape of the spike protein, thereby preventing it from entering and infecting human cells. With the help of a mentor, she thinks she found a molecule that might be able to do that in a database of millions of compounds, an example of how computers can aid drug design.
“I was amazed at how we could use computational methods to identify potential antivirals against viruses and diseases,” Chebrolu said.
Number-crunching supercomputers are helping scientists better understand that coronavirus spike protein and better fight it as well.
“I think once we figure out how it works, we might be able to re-engineer it to do some good things because it’s so sophisticated in what it does,” said Dr. Michael Peters, a protein engineer at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Peters is using biophysics-based computations to come up a spike protein-targeted therapeutic. Chebrolu’s version will need to be rigorously tested in the lab but it paid off in the recent 3M competition.
“Anika Chebrolu, congratulations, you are America’s Top Young Scientist,” said an announcer as she and her parents embraced.
Her credo, at the ripe old age of 14, is to stay curious and keep asking questions.
“Well honestly age is just a number and as long as you put your mind to something, as long as you’re really passionate about something, then anything can be accomplished,” Chebrolu said.
Her next step is contacting virologists and drug development specialists to begin the process of determining whether her antiviral is safe, effective and could make COVID-19 a little more manageable down the road.
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