Italy’s medicines regulator has given the go-ahead for human clinical trials on raloxifene, a generic osteoporosis drug that researchers hope may help reduce COVID-19 symptoms and make patients less infectious.

The drug was identified as a potential COVID-19 treatment by the use of supercomputers to screen more than 400,000 molecules for chemical characteristics that might inhibit the virus, focusing on those already approved for use in humans.

Andrea Beccari, from Exscalate4Cov, a public-private consortium led by Italy’s Dompé Farmaceutici, said researchers hoped that raloxifene – a selective oestrogen receptor modulator – would block replication of the virus in cells and thus slow down progress of the disease.

“It inhibits virus replication, thus preventing the worsening of patients with mild symptoms, and also decreases infectivity, limiting the viral load,” said Marco Allegretti, head of research at Dompé Farmaceutici.