The 21st century has witnessed three outbreaks of coronavirus (CoVs) infections caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-CoV, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2. Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by SARS-CoV-2, spreads rapidly and since the discovery of the first COVID-19 infection in December 2019, has caused 1.2 million deaths worldwide and 226,777 deaths in the United States alone. The high amino acid similarity between SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 viral proteins supports testing therapeutic molecules that were designed to treat SARS infections during the 2003 epidemic. In this review, we provide information on possible COVID-19 treatment strategies that act via inhibition of the two essential proteins of the virus, 3C-like protease (3CL pro ) or papain-like protease (PL pro ). K E Y W O R D S 3 chymotrypsin-like cysteine protease, coronavirus main protease, COVID-19, papain-like cysteine protease, SARS coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 1 | INTRODUCTION Coronaviruses (CoVs) belong to the Nidovirales order of enveloped positive-sense single-stranded RNA viruses. Before 2002, there were only two known human CoV species, HCoV-229E and HCoV-OC43, with infections exhibiting symptoms similar to those of the common cold caused by rhinovirus. These two CoV were identified in 1965 and have been extensively studied for the following 20 years. 1 There are now seven known species of human CoVs (HCoVs): HCoV-229E, HCoV-OC43, HCoV-NL63, HCoV-HKU1, MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2 belonging to alpha-and beta-coronaviruses (Figure 1A). 2 About 30% of mild upper respiratory diseases are caused by HCoV-229E, HCoV-OC43, HCoV-NL63, and HCoV-HKU1. 3,4 SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, which first appeared in China in 2002 and in Saudi Arabia in 2012, respectively, caused severe health and economic crisis at the global level. Even though its infection rate is slow, MERS-CoV infections are still ongoing and between January 2020 and September 2020, 61 new cases were reported with 21 deaths. The mortality rate of MERS ( 30%) is about three times more than that of SARS (10%).The recently emerged novel SARS-CoV-2, which is currently wreaking havoc worldwide, has infected 44 million individuals and caused 1.2 million deaths as of November 10, 2020 (https:// coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html). SARS-CoV-2 infection results in coronavirus disease 2019 and the clinical manifestations include fever (88.7%), dry cough (67.8%), sore throat (13.9%), dyspnea (18.6%), fatigue (38.1%) and gastrointestinal symptoms (8.8%). SARS-CoV-2 is a close cousin of SARS-CoV, sharing an overall amino-acid sequence identity of 82%. 5 Based on this similarity it is reasonable to assume that knowledge of the molecular pathogenesis of SARS-CoV could help develop SARS-CoV-2 treatment strategies. Currently, the US FDA has approved remdesivir