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Drug test bed
Scientists are also studying whether organoids can be used to model how drugs react in the body. The hope is that organoids can be used to test potential COVID-19 therapies, some of which have already been rushed through to clinical trials without extensive testing in cell and animal models.
“Due to the time sensitivity, many clinical trials were designed based on previous knowledge of other coronaviruses and launched without careful evaluation in model systems,” says Chen. “As a result, many of them have failed.”
Chen screened some 1,200 drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for other illnesses and found that the cancer medication（药物；药物治疗） imatinib suppressed SARS-CoV-2 in lung organoids3. Several human clinical trials of the drug as a treatment for COVID-19 have since been launched.
Other groups are also testing existing drugs against the coronavirus in organoids, with some success2,8. “We will only know at the end of this process what the predictive value of these systems are for testing drug efficacy,” says Haagmans. “This is a long-term process.”
medication：药物；药物治疗
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