New COVID Drugs That Work Better Than Paxlovid

Here's an encouraging piece of news, excerpted from the SciTech Daily article:

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From SciTech Daily May 3, 2025: "New Drugs Outperform Paxlovid – A Game Changer for COVID and Future Pandemics", by University of California - San Francisco, May 3, 2025

"Researchers at UC San Francisco and the Gladstone Institutes have developed new drug candidates that show strong potential against the virus responsible for COVID-19, as well as other coronaviruses that could drive future pandemics.

"In preclinical studies, these compounds outperformed Paxlovid in combating both SARS-CoV-2 and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus, a pathogen known for causing deadly outbreaks around the world.

“In three years, we’ve moved as fast as a pharmaceutical company would have, from start to finish, developing drug candidates against a totally new pathogen,” said Charles Craik, PhD, UCSF professor of pharmaceutical chemistry and co-corresponding author of the paper, which appears April 23 in Science Advances.

“These compounds could inhibit coronaviruses in general, giving us a head start against the next pandemic,” Craik said. “We need to get them across the finish line and into clinical trials.”

"The work was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to prepare for the next coronavirus epidemic – work that pharmaceutical companies have largely abandoned. But the grant to UCSF has since been terminated, and the group’s antiviral drug candidates face an uncertain future.

"The discovery came out of UCSF’s Antiviral Drug Discovery (AViDD) Center for Pathogens of Pandemic Concern, which funded the work of several hundred scientists at UCSF and beyond. It is one of nine centers that NIAD created in 2022 to bolster the nation’s pandemic preparedness."