It was not a ranking. The second position was completely arbitrary. And the number of drugs listed was also arbitrary. For example, if indeed clinical stage BET inhibitors were under consideration, then why only list apabetalone and a few others like JQ1? The latter isn't even clinical stage. What about the long list of other BET bromodomain inhibitor in clinical trials (primarily oncology) or pre-clinical. I truly believe that the only reason that apabetalone was on the list was because Golfyeti and others contacted the author after the initial news story (but before the scientific article was published online) and they added it to the list. They were simply providing examples from each drug class that may interact with the particular viral protein. Nothing was actually tested in that study; it was all predictive and hypothesis generating. No test of safety or efficacy.

Could it work? Sure. But for the reasons above there is no indication yet that it does anything. 

BDAZ