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Combination therapy enhances the antiviral activity of IFN-λ against SARS-CoV-2 and MERS-CoV

2025· article· en· W4408554614 on OpenAlexafffund
Vahid Rajabali Zadeh, J. Lew, Muhammad Atif Zahoor, Deanna M. Santer, Jordan J. Feld, Darryl Falzarano

Bibliographic record

VenueVirus Research · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicSARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 Research
Canadian institutionsUniversity of TorontoUniversity of ManitobaUniversity Health NetworkToronto Liver CentreUniversity of Saskatchewan
FundersCanadian Institutes of Health ResearchGovernment of SaskatchewanCanada Foundation for InnovationMinistry of Agriculture - Saskatchewan
KeywordsBiologyVirologySevere acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)2019-20 coronavirus outbreakAntiviral therapyBetacoronavirusPandemicComputational biologyVirusOutbreakInfectious disease (medical specialty)MedicineDisease

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

• SARS-CoV-2 lineages showed varying, but increased resistance to IFN-λ treatment in comparison to the ancestral isolate. • MERS-CoV was found to be more resistant (50 times higher EC 90 ) to IFN-λ treatment compared to the ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2. • We demonstrate the benefit of combining IFN-λ with direct-acting agents as a broad-spectrum therapeutic strategy against coronaviruses. Therapeutic options against pathogenic human coronaviruses remain limited. In a recent clinical trial, we demonstrated the therapeutic efficacy of pegylated-IFN-λ in COVID-19 outpatients. However, the emergence of variants that have the potential to evade IFN-mediated antiviral responses raises concerns regarding the continued efficacy of this approach. In this work, we compared the sensitivity of SARS-CoV-2 variants and MERS-CoV to IFN-λ treatment in vitro and explored the potential of combination therapy with other FDA-authorized or approved antiviral agents. We observed that in contrast to the ancestral strain, all other SARS-CoV-2 lineages showed varying, but increased resistance to IFN-λ treatment, from a 5.7-fold increase in EC 50 value for the P.1 strain to a 32.7-fold increase for the B.1.1.7 variant. We further show that combination treatment with remdesivir or nirmatrelvir enhanced the antiviral effect of IFN-λ against both SARS-CoV-2 and MERS-CoV. These findings justify the initiation of further in vivo testing that ultimately can help inform the development of more effective therapeutic guidelines against pathogenic coronaviruses.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.119
Threshold uncertainty score0.501

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.114
GPT teacher head0.452
Teacher spread0.338 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designBench or experimental
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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