COVID‐19 drug repurposing: Summary statistics on current clinical trials and promising untested candidates

Abstract

Summary Repurposing of existing antiviral drugs, immunological modulators, and supportive therapies represents a promising path toward rapidly developing new control strategies to mitigate the devastating public health consequences of the COVID‐19 pandemic. A comprehensive text‐mining and manual curation approach was used to comb and summarize the most pertinent information from existing clinical trials and previous efforts to develop therapies against related betacoronaviruses, particularly SARS and MERS. In contrast to drugs in current trials, which have been derived overwhelmingly from studies on taxonomically unrelated RNA viruses, a number of untested small molecule antivirals had previously demonstrated remarkable in vitro specificity for SARS‐CoV or MERS‐CoV, with high selectivity indices, EC 50 , and/or IC 50 . Due to the rapid containment of the prior epidemics, however, these were generally not followed up with in vivo animal studies or clinical investigations, and thus largely overlooked as treatment prospects in the current COVID‐19 trials. This brief review summarizes and tabulates core information on recent or ongoing drug repurposing‐focused clinical trials, while detailing the most promising untested candidates with prior documented success against the etiologic agents of SARS and/or MERS.

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“…Given the fragility of time, the rapid development of remedial treatment has become an urgent need of the hour. Therefore, drug repurposing or the use of already approved drugs has emerged as an effective approach that paves the way towards clinical trials [ 96 , 97 ]. The safety profile of these medicines is one of the advantages of these drugs over newly designed therapy.…”

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“…Íåîáõîäèìî îòìåòèòü, ÷òî ïåðâûå ïîäõîäû ê ïåðåïðîôèëèðîâàíèþ ËÑ äëÿ òåðàïèè COVID-19 ñ èñïîëüçîâàíèåì èíôîðìàöèè îá àêòèâíîñòè in vitro ðàíåå áûëè îïèñàíû äëÿ ËÑ â îòíîøåíèè ðîäñòâåííûõ êîðîíàâèðóñîâ SARS-CoV è MERS-CoV [10]. Îäíàêî íåïîñðåäñòâåííîå èñïîëüçîâàíèå ïîëó÷åííûõ ðåçóëüòàòîâ íà îñíîâå àíàëîãèè íåâîçìîaeíî.…”

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“…It showed improvement in the radiological examination of lung more than lopinavir and ritonavir, and also decreased the hospitalization period [ 33 ]. Some studies showed the efficacy of CQ and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) in the cell culture but HCQ was lower in toxicity compared to CQ [ 34 ]. CQ and HCQ share nearly the same chemical structure and mechanism of action as well [ 35 ].…”