Thousands of medicinal samples to be tested in Belgium for inhibiting impact on virus

Bill and Melinda Gates have paid for 15,000 medicinal molecules to be shipped to a leading laboratory in Belgium to be tested as a potential cure to the coronavirus.

The therapeutic samples, all active ingredients in current antiviral treatments, will be screened at high speed for their inhibiting effect on particles developed from a swab from the first Belgian patient to be diagnosed.

The molecules, from the Scripps research institute in California, will be shipped to the Rega Institute for Medical Research, in Leuven, 20 miles (32km) east of Brussels. The Scripps institute has an extensive collection of the active ingredients of existing or in-development drugs.

Quick guide What are coronavirus symptoms and should I go to a doctor? Show Hide What is Covid-19? Covid-19 is caused by a member of the coronavirus family that has never been encountered before. Like other coronaviruses, it has come from animals. The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared it a pandemic. What are the symptoms this coronavirus causes? According to the WHO, the most common symptoms of Covid-19 are fever, tiredness and a dry cough. Some patients may also have a runny nose, sore throat, nasal congestion and aches and pains or diarrhoea. Some people report losing their sense of taste and/or smell. About 80% of people who get Covid-19 experience a mild case – about as serious as a regular cold – and recover without needing any special treatment. About one in six people, the WHO says, become seriously ill. The elderly and people with underlying medical problems like high blood pressure, heart problems or diabetes, or chronic respiratory conditions, are at a greater risk of serious illness from Covid-19. In the UK, the National health Service (NHS) has identified the specific symptoms to look for as experiencing either: a high temperature - you feel hot to touch on your chest or back

a new continuous cough - this means you’ve started coughing repeatedly As this is viral pneumonia, antibiotics are of no use. The antiviral drugs we have against flu will not work, and there is currently no vaccine. Recovery depends on the strength of the immune system. Should I go to the doctor if I have a cough? Medical advice varies around the world - with many countries imposing travel bans and lockdowns to try and prevent the spread of the virus. In many place people are being told to stay at home rather than visit a doctor of hospital in person. Check with your local authorities. In the UK, NHS advice is that anyone with symptoms should stay at home for at least 7 days. If you live with other people, they should stay at home for at least 14 days, to avoid spreading the infection outside the home.

Prof Johan Neyts, who will carry out the analysis in Leuven, said he expected results within a fortnight of the shipment arriving in Belgium.

He said: “The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation hopes that there are one or more molecules among the 15,000 substances that can also inhibit the new coronavirus. We’ll figure that out for them. We will know the results a week or two after the shipment is delivered.”

The biosafety laboratory in Leuven is one of the few facilities in the world able to test thousands of molecules at high speed.

The cost to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will be “a few tens of thousands of euros”, Neyts said. “That’s nothing compared to what it costs to design and market a medicine from scratch,”, he told De Standaard newspaper.

Neyts said he did not expect a miracle cure but that any sign of inhibition of the Covid-19 disease would be considered a significant breakthrough.

He said: “A bit is also good. Or even better: a few substances that inhibit a little, and which we can then combine to hopefully cure seriously-ill patients.”

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has said it will provide up to $100m to improve detection, isolation and treatment efforts in response to the global epidemic. By Wednesday morning, more than 93,000 people had been infected in more than 80 countries and the global death toll was 3,190.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Prof Johan Neyts, at the Rega Institute for Medical Research in Beligium, says a few different substances could be combined to help seriously-ill patients. Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters

Writing on the website’s foundation Gates, a co-founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s wealthiest private individuals, said he believed there were promising efforts being made to find vaccines “ready for larger-scale trials as early as June”.

He added: “Drug discovery can also be accelerated by drawing on libraries of compounds that have already been tested for safety and by applying new screening techniques, including machine learning, to identify antivirals that could be ready for large-scale clinical trials within weeks.”

There are no proven treatments for coronavirus but a few drugs are already being tested on humans in China. One, Kaletra, has previously been used to treat people with HIV. It has been tested on 200 people so far and results are expected in about a week.

A second, Remdesivir, was tested during the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2018 but it was found to be insufficiently effective.

Both trials were expedited by the World Health Organization. As they have been approved for other conditions there will not need to be the usual safety tests on animals and humans.