Wendy Barclay

What age are the more susceptible hosts and the people who are involved in transmission?

So all of those parameters about hosts will also feed into the overall transmission of the virus at any one stage.

And both of those things, both the host side and the virus side,

change as time goes by, as does the environment as well.

So maybe the virus is more transmissible on a hot day than a cold day or the other way around.

That all changes as well as does human behaviour with environmental changes.

So we can expect the dynamics, if you like, of the virus to change as the epidemic proceeds, partly driven by host changes, perhaps also driven by some evolutionary changes in the virus.

Unfortunately, there are no antiviral drugs licensed specifically for the treatment of coronavirus infections at the moment.

there are some likely candidates which can be tested quite quickly in clinical trials.

For example, some of the drugs that we currently use against HIV target the protease enzymes of HIV.

And because coronaviruses also express a number of proteases in their replication cycle, there is some thought that the protease inhibitors that were originally developed for HIV may be effective against some of the coronaviruses.

And indeed, some early preclinical work with the MERS virus, which is another coronavirus that's emerged from animals into humans in the last decade.

those trials or those preclinical trials do suggest that these HIV protease inhibitors might be worth trialling.

So that's one set of drugs.

There's other drugs that we would think of using against RNA viruses are the nucleoside analogues.

So these are like small bases that get incorporated into the growing strand of the new RNA that's being synthesised by the virus.

And when they get incorporated, they either terminate the chain or they make a mistake and you get mutation over and above the regulated rate that the virus can tolerate.

There is a new one of those which looks effective against coronaviruses.

Interestingly, many of the nucleoside analogues that have been developed for other viruses don't work against the coronaviruses.

And remember that that might be because the coronaviruses encode their own proofreading activity to stop themselves making mistakes.