Abstract
Since the first reports from December 2019, COVID-19 caused an overwhelming global pandemic that has affected 223 countries, seriously endangering public health and creating an urgent need for effective drugs to treat SARS-CoV-2 infection. Currently, there is a lack of safe, effective, and specific therapeutic drugs for COVID-19, with mainly supportive and symptomatic treatments being administered to patients. The preferred option for responding to an outbreak of acute infectious disease is through drug repurposing, saving valuable time that would otherwise be lost in preclinical and clinical research, hastening clinical introduction, and lowering treatment costs. Alternatively, researchers seek to design and discover novel small-molecule candidate drugs targeting the key proteins in the life cycle of SARS-CoV-2 through an in-depth study of the infection mechanism, thus obtaining a number of candidate compounds with favorable antiviral effects in preclinical and clinical settings. There is an urgent need to further elucidate the efficacy and mechanism of action of potential anti-SARS-CoV-2 small-molecule drugs. Herein, we review the candidate small-molecule anti-SARS-CoV-2 drugs in ongoing clinical trials, with a major focus on their mechanisms of action in an attempt to provide useful insight for further research and development of small-molecule compounds against SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Highlights
Since its identification in December 2019, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV-2) has spread, resulting in a global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), an acute respiratory infection posing a severe threat to human health and public health security on a global scale (Wang C. et al, 2020; Zhou et al, 2020)
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, the research and development of anti-SARS-CoV-2 drugs remain of utmost importance
With the subsequent and still ongoing elucidation of the function and structure of SARSCoV-2 proteins, the screening of small molecules based on their targets will represent a more effective strategy to discover effective drugs against SARS-COV-2
Summary
Since its identification in December 2019, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV-2) has spread, resulting in a global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), an acute respiratory infection posing a severe threat to human health and public health security on a global scale (Wang C. et al, 2020; Zhou et al, 2020). In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists are actively engaged in researching and developing effective drugs against SARS-CoV-2. The preferred strategy in conditions of an acute infectious disease outbreak is to rapidly repurpose existing effective drugs, saving time for preclinical/clinical research and significantly reducing the time and cost associated with drug development (Wang M. et al, 2020; Talevi and Bellera, 2020). Researchers have sought to design and discover novel small-molecule drugs targeting key proteins in the SARS-CoV-2 life cycle through an in-depth study of the mechanisms underlying infection, with a number of small-molecule candidate drugs already described (Dai et al, 2020; Yin et al, 2020). There is an urgent need to comprehensively elucidate the mechanism of action of these small-molecule drugs, identify potential drug targets, and develop more effective and safer anti-SARS-CoV-2 agents
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