Unlike some of its Big Pharma peers, Novartis has not been at the forefront of creating new vaccines and treatments against COVID: Now, however, it’s taking its massive R&D budget and targeting not just the current pandemic, but all coronaviruses.
The U.S.-Swiss pharma is working on a main protease (Mpro) inhibitor drug, an early field of study that has been yielding some very preclinical glimmers that it can fight back against SARS-CoV-2.
But Novartis, which is in the preclinical phase for this program, has found that the main protease is not limited to just SARS-CoV-2 but rather is highly genetically conserved across many coronaviruses.