The antidepressants fluoxetine, fluvoxamine, amitriptyline and sertraline are known as functional inhibitors of the acid sphingomyelinase (FIASMAs), and some of them were already shown to potently inhibit viral infections, including Zika virus, MERS-CoV and early variants of SARS-CoV-2 (Kornhuber et al., 2022; Kutkat et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2023). Here, SMPD1 is linked to viral infectious disease.