Date Time Cancer Drug Shows Potent Activity in Lab Against SARS-CoV-2, Including B.1.1.7 Variant Plitidepsin was 27.5-fold more potent against SARS-CoV-2 than remdesivir, a drug that received FDA emergency use authorization in 2020 for the treatment of COVID-19, according to new research. Image by NIH Scientists at UC San Francisco’s Quantitative Bioscience Institute (QBI) and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai (ISMMS) in New York have shown that plitidepsin (Aplidin), a drug approved by the Australian Regulatory Agency for the treatment of multiple myeloma, has potent antiviral activity against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. In laboratory experiments reported in Science on Jan. 25, plitidepsin, a compound originally discovered in a Mediterranean sea squirt, was 27.5-fold more potent against SARS-CoV-2 than remdesivir, a drug that received FDA emergency use authorization in 2020 for the treatment of COVID-19. In addition, in two preclinical models of COVID-19, plitidepsin showed a 100-fold reduction in viral replication in the lungs and demonstrated an ability to reduce lung inflammation.