Researchers in the United States and the United Kingdom have revealed that Lagevrio, a drug designed by Merck to treat COVID, is causing the virus to mutate in patients.
This creates the potential for more communicable and lethal versions of Covid to emerge in the future.
When one studies how Lagevrio works, this should not come as a shock. The pill attacks the COVID virus by trying to change its genetic code.
Once inside a human cell, the virus can make 10,000 copies of its genetic code in a matter of hours. Each copy made increases the risk of the virus making a rare mistake and creating an exact replica.
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That’s how mutations happen, as we’ve seen with COVID. A drug that intentionally changes the genetic code of a virus increases the risk of mutation.
Moreover, many scientists warned Merck that their drug could cause problematic mutations that would make the virus more dangerous and harder to treat. The company decided to blow off any concerns and put the Lagevrio on the market anyway.
Here’s Bloomberg’s full report:
Merck & Co. ‘s Covid-19 pill is causing new mutations of the virus in some patients, according to a study underscoring the dangers of trying to deliberately alter the pathogen’s genetic code.
Some researchers worry the drug could create more infectious or health-threatening variants of Covid, which has killed more than 6.8 million people globally in the past three years.
Mutations associated with use of Merck’s pill, Lagevrio, were identified in viral samples taken from dozens of patients, according to a preprint study by researchers from the US and the Francis Crick Institute, Imperial College London and other UK institutions.
Drug-linked variants of the virus have not yet been shown to be more immune-evasive or lethal, according to a study published Friday without peer review on the medRxiv website. But their existence highlights what some scientists say are potential risks in the drug’s widespread use, which has recently been cleared in China.
Lagevrio works by creating mutations in the Covid genome that prevent the virus from replicating in the body, making it less likely to cause severe illness. Some scientists had warned before it was authorized in late 2021 that, depending on how it works, the drug could lead to mutations that turn out to be problematic. The preprint paper reawakened those worries about the Merck drug.
“There’s always been this underlying concern that it could contribute to the problem of generating new mutations,” said Jonathan Li, a virologist at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “It’s mostly hypothetical, but this preprint validates those concerns.”