Individuals with compromised immunity and persistent COVID-19 infections can harbor drug-resistant variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which have the potential to spread to the general population found researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine, the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University and the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). In the study , published Sept. 18 in Nature Communications , researchers isolated drug-resistant strains of SARS-CoV-2 from people who had not cleared the virus after two to three months of infection and treatments with antiviral drugs .
One variant showed resistance to antivirals Paxlovid and remdesivir while another strain had mutations associated with a decreased sensitivity to remdesivir and a third antiviral drug, the monoclonal antibody sotrovimab. "The risk in emerging mutations is the possibility of transmitting these new resistant variants to the general population with fewer viable treatment options available," said the study's co-senior author, Dr. Mirella Salvatore, associate professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and infectious disease physician at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.
"We have to come up with better treatments for immunocompromised patients and consider investigating combinations of therapies." Dr. Elodie Ghedin, senior investigator and chief of the Systems Genomics Section in NIAID, is co-senior author.
Dr. Mohammed Nooruzzam.