Over 50 million people have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, while around 1 million have died due to COVID-19 disease progression. COVID-19 presents flu-like symptoms that can escalate, in about 7 e10 days from onset, into a cytokine storm causing respiratory failure and death. Although social distancing reduces transmissibility, COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics are essential to regain socioeconomic normalcy. Even if effective and safe vaccines are found, pharmacological interventions are still needed to limit disease severity and mortality. Integrating current knowledge and drug candidates (approved drugs for repositioning among >35 candidates) undergoing clinical studies (>3000 registered in ClinicalTrials.gov), we employed Systems Pharmacology approaches to project how antivirals and immunoregulatory agents could be optimally evaluated for use. Antivirals are likely to be effective only at the early stage of infection, soon after exposure and before hospitalization, while immunomodulatory agents should be effective in the later-stage cytokine storm. As current antiviral candidates are administered in hospitals over 5e7 days, a long-acting combination that targets multiple SARS-CoV-2 lifecycle steps may provide a long-lasting, single-dose treatment in outpatient settings. Long-acting therapeutics may still be needed even when vaccines become available as vaccines are likely to be approved based on a 50% efficacy target.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is marked by the progressive degeneration of dopaminergic neurons (DAN) accompanied by glial activation. Thus, inhibiting glial activation that occurs during this disease could be an effective method for treating PD. Optimized Yinxieling Formula (OYF), a Chinese medicinal formula, which is used to efficiently treat autoimmune disease psoriasis, has been proved to display potential immunomodulatory effects in inflammation-associated diseases. This study assessed the therapeutic benefits of OYF on glial-mediated neuroinflammation and neuroprotection in PD models in vitro and in vivo. First, the results showed that OYF significantly suppresses LPS-induced proinflammatory cytokine secretion and attenuates the overall inflammatory responses in BV-2 cells. Second, in vivo studies confirm that while the validity of our MPTP-induced PD mouse models possesses activated glia and significant neurobehavioral dysfunction, pretreatment with OYF prevents glial activation and ameliorates movement dysfunction in the MPTP-induced PD mouse models as evaluated by the pole and rotarod tests. Third, transcriptomic analyses were carried out to reveal the underlying molecular mechanism of the OYF treatment. Sixteen pathways were significantly upregulated in the OYF-treated PD model mice, including the cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction, cell adhesion molecules, coagulation, and complement cascades. Fifteen pathways were significantly downregulated in the OYF-treated PD model mice, such as the natural killer cell mediated cytotoxicity, hematopoietic cell lineage, phagosome, and others. These pathways share direct or indirect features of immunomodulation, suggesting that the physiological effects of OYF involve key roles of immune and inflammation regulations. Therefore, we prove that OYF is a useful immunomodulatory formula in developing prevention and treatment methods for neurodegenerative disease PD.