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?:abstract
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Corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a respiratory disease caused by a new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) which causes significant morbidity and mortality The emergence of this novel and highly pathogenic SARS-CoV-2 and its rapid international spread poses a serious global public health emergency To date 32,174,627 cases, of which 962,613 (2 99%) have died, have been reported (https://www who int/westernpacific/health-topics/coronavirus, accessed 23 Sep 2020) The outbreak was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on 30 January 2020 There are still not many SARS-CoV-2-specific and effective treatments or vaccines available A second round of infection is obviously unavoidable Aptamers had already been at the centre of interest in the fight against viruses before now The selection and development of a new aptamer is, however, a time-consuming process We therefore checked whether a clinically developed aptamer, BC 007, which is currently in phase 2 of clinical testing for a different indication, would also be able to efficiently bind DNA-susceptible peptide structures from SARS-CoV-2-spreading crucial proteins, such as the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the spike protein and the RNA dependent RNA polymerase of SARS-CoV-2 (re-purposing) Indeed, several such sequence-sections have been identified In particular for two of these sequences, BC 007 showed specific binding in a therapy-relevant concentration range, as shown in Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)- and Circular dicroism (CD)-spectroscopy and isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC) The excellent clinical toxicity and tolerability profile of this substance opens up an opportunity for rapid clinical testing of its COVID-19 effectiveness
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