Fig. 2: Efficacy of CIM-834 in SARS-CoV-2 infected SCID mice and hamsters.
From: A coronavirus assembly inhibitor that targets the viral membrane protein
a, SCID mice were intranasally infected with 105 times the tissue-culture infectious dose (TCID50) of SARS-CoV-2 B.1.351 and treated twice a day with CIM-834 or with nirmatrelvir. No ritonavir was used in either of the treated groups. Treatment was initiated just before infection (Day 0) or at the indicated times after infection. b,c, Lung infectious titres (b) and vRNA load (c) determined 3 days after infection. Individual data and median values are shown, along with P-values. d, Weight change for the different treatment groups at day 3 after infection as a percentage, normalized to the body weight at the time of infection (Kruskal–Wallis test and Dunn’s comparison, mean ± s.d.; n = 2 biologically independent experiments with 6 mice in each group per experiment). e, Syrian hamsters were intranasally infected with 104 times the TCID50 of SARS-CoV-2 USA-WA1/2020 treated for four consecutive days with vehicle, CIM-834/ritonavir (100 + 50 mg per kg, twice a day) or nirmatrelvir (300 mg per kg, twice a day). One day after infection, treated index hamsters were co-housed with untreated sentinel hamsters. f, Lung infectious titres, vRNA load and pathology scores of index hamsters at day 4 after infection. g, Lung infectious titres and vRNA load in untreated sentinel hamsters three days after the start of co-housing (Kruskal–Wallis test and Dunn’s comparison; n = 2 biologically independent experiments with, for each experiment, two hamsters for the mock-infected group, two hamsters in the group of sentinels co-housed with vehicle-treated hamsters and four hamsters in the other groups). h, Representative haematoxylin and eosin-stained images of hamster lungs at day 4 after infection (see supplementary Table 1 for all lung pathology scores). Blue and red arrows indicate inflamed bronchi and vascular regions, respectively; green arrows indicate limited bronchopneumonia (only observed in the vehicle group). Scale bars, 100 μm. Credit: a,e, created in BioRender, M. Laporte (2025). https://BioRender.com/q39i535.
