Clinical studies have identified a cytokine storm in the third stage of disease progression in critical ill patients with coronavirus disease 2019 . Hence, effectively suppressing the uncontrolled immune response of the host towards the invaded viruses in a cytokine storm is a critical step to prevent the deterioration of patient conditions and decrease the rate of mortality. Therapeutic monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) are found to be effective for the management of acute respiratory distress syndrome in patients with COVID-19. In this review, we compiled all therapeutic mAbs targeting cytokine storm, which are in clinical trials for its repurposing in the management of COVID-19. Compilation of clinical trial data indicated that therapeutic monoclonal antibodies targeting interleukins (IL-6, IL-1ra, IL-8, IL-1β, IL-17A, IL-33), interferon-gamma, tumor necrosis factor-alpha, Pselectin, connective tissue growth factor, plasma kallikrein, tumor necrosis factor superfamily 14, granulocyte macrophage colony stimulating factor, colony stimulating factor 1 receptor, C-C chemokine receptor type 5, cluster of differentiation 14 and 147, vascular endothelial growth factor, programmed cell death protein-1, Angiopoietin -2, human factor XIIa, complementary protein 5, natural killer cell receptor G2A, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2, immunoglobulin-like transcript 7 receptor, complement component fragment 5a receptor and viral attachment to the human cell were under investigation for management of severely ill patients with COVID-19. Among these, about 65 clinical trials are targeting IL-6 inhibition as the most promising one and Tocilizumab, an IL-6 inhibitor is considered to be the potential candidate to treat cytokine storm associated with the COVID-19.
OverviewCoronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is the infectious disease, which affects primarily the lungs, caused by newly identified coronavirus termed as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Patient infected with SARS-CoV-2 was initially discovered at Wuhan, China in December 2019 and is still spreading across the globe (Singhal, 2020). The COVID-19 outbreak was declared as pandemic on March 11, 2020 by the world health organization (WHO) (Coperchini et al., 2020). By September 9, 2020 the number of deaths raised to 896K amongst 27.5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19. The majority of the patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 in this COVID-19 pandemic are clinically asymptomatic or develop mild clinical manifestations like cough, mild fever, or muscle soreness. However, nearly 10-20% of patients (especially geriatric and patients with other co-morbidity) will develop pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) (Soy et al., 2020). This COVID-19 pandemic created global crises of both public health as well as economic and thus emerged the need for rapid development of vaccines and therapeutic countermeasures (Sempowski et al., 2020). One approach for finding appropriate therapeutics for treating COVID-19 is rapid repurposing of existin...
