Finding a Cure

As a new laboratory, we are in some ways limited in our ability to organize a research program to study COVID-19. The opportunity perform research on COVID-19 came when my laboratory’s expertise in structural biology is called for in a joint effort to discover potential drugs to treat the disease. Knowing that we are doing our part in the laboratory helped us deal with the sense of helplessness while the virus ravages across the globe.

Visualising how drug molecules inactivate their target viral components is an important aspect of antiviral drug discovery for COVID-19. As part of a collaborative team with scientists from other universities in Hong Kong, we provide expertise in purifying viral components such as COVID-19 proteins and studying how drugs act on these targets. We are particularly interested in viral components that are essential in viral replication. These viral components allow the coronavirus to make more copies of themselves during infection. Our goal is to find drug molecules that will block the functions of these vital proteins. To visualize how the drugs work at the atomic level, we use protein X-ray crystallography to obtain 3-dimensional structures of protein-drug complexes. These 3D structural data give us insights into how potential drug molecules work on COVID-19 components and how we can improve the effectiveness of drug molecules.

Combating COVID-19 from Chinese Medicine Perspectives

COVID-19 pandemic is caused by a virus named as SARS-CoV-2, which is the third coronavirus significantly threat human in the past two decades. However, before SARS broke out in 2002, coronavirus was generally considered as a harmless virus that only caused mild flu symptom. Consequently, little knowledge was available for this virus, particularly how the virus behaves once it enter the cells.

Collaborating with State Key Laboratory for Emerging Infectious Diseases in HKU, SKLEBA research team is investigating how cells respond to SARS-CoV-2 infection. Briefly, we examined cellular proteins and their abundance before and immediately after the infection of COVID-19, then screened the ones changed most. In this regard, it is hoped to identify novel proteins that affects by SARS-CoV-2. In theory, these proteins should be of vital importance to viral replication. If an appropriate medicine is available to specifically inhibit the protein activity, it could serve as a potential cue for COVID-19. Currently, we have identified a few candidate proteins that might be used by the virus immediately after infection. Experiments with some promising inhibitors are now on-going. SKLEBA has been awarded $1.2 million, by the Innovation and Technology Commission, to develop test kits based on biomarkers and COVID-19 antigens using nano-material. It is expected that the kit can directly assess the level of herd immunity and monitor the immune response that may help the vaccine development.