Ethanol Inhalation as a Method to Denature the Spike Protein of SARS-CoV-2.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus caused the 2019 COVID pandemic by infecting almost eight hundred million people worldwide. Because it was a new viral infection, there were no vaccines or small molecule medications that could prevent or treat the disease.  This chapter provides some details for an obscure treatment for COVID-19, that has decades of anti-viral activity data both in vitro and in vivo in the literature. The medicinal molecules are compared to other small molecules that were identified as possible medications for COVID-19.  We developed a computational method that ranks small molecules and their ability to penetrate mucus in the lungs of a COVID-19 patient. Our focus is ethanol as a COVID-19 treatment. The results discussed here are based on Lipinski Rules and QSAR computational methods as well as in vitro and in vivo data. These parameters indicate that ethanol should be a strong candidate for future evaluations.