Individual ingredients of NP-101 (Thymoquinone formula) inhibit SARS-CoV-2 pseudovirus infection
Abdelrahim Maen, Betul Gok Yavuz, Yehia I Mohamed, Abdullah Esmail, Jianming Lu, Amr Mohamed, Asfar S Azmi, Mohamed Kaseb, Osama Kasseb, Dan Li, Michelle Gocio, Mehmet Kocak, Abdelhafez Selim, Qing Ma, Ahmed O Kaseb
Frontiers in Pharmacology, doi:10.3389/fphar.2024.1291212
Thymoquinone TQ, an active ingredient of Nigella Sativa, has been shown to inhibit COVID-19 symptoms in clinical trials. Thymoquinone Formulation (TQF or NP-101) is developed as a novel enteric-coated medication derivative from Nigella Sativa. TQF consists of TQ with a favorable concentration and fatty acids, including palmitic, oleic, and linoleic acids. In this study, we aimed to investigate the roles of individual ingredients of TQF on infection of SARS-CoV-2 variants in-vitro, by utilizing Murine Leukemia Virus (MLV) based pseudovirus particles. We demonstrated that NP-101, TQ, and other individual ingredients, including oleic, linoleic, and palmitic acids inhibited SARS-CoV-2 infection in the MLV-based pseudovirus model. A large, randomized phase 2 study of NP-101 is planned in outpatient COVID-19 patients.
Author contributions AbM: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal Analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing-original draft, Writing-review and editing. BG: Conceptualization, Investigation, Software, Writing-original draft, Writing-review and editing. YM: Conceptualization, Data
Conflict of interest Author JL was employed by Codex BioSolutions Inc. Authors MoK, OK, and MG were employed by Novatek Pharmaceuticals, Inc. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The author(s) declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.
Publisher's note All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their
Supplementary material The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2024.1291212/ full#supplementary-material
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