Recent research for COVID-19 drugs and therapies

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<p indent="0mm">The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 is causing a severe health crisis to China and the world. The rapid spread coronavirus worldwide highlights the urgent need to find effective drugs and therapies to fight the COVID-19 and related diseases such as acute respiratory disease. Based on the current knowledge on the structure, pathogenic mechanism and pharmacy of coronavirus and previous understanding and experience in treating similar diseases, researchers are testing and screening the approved broad-spectrum antiviral drugs and compounds, and investigating new specific drugs aiming at curing COVID-19. Facing the coronavirus pandemic, it is essential methods and strategies to review existing broad-spectrum antiviral drugs and screen possible effective medicines through some compounds database or repository of structured medical information. Till now, scientists have proposed hundreds of possible drug candidates in a short period of time. This article summarized the potential drugs and treatments proposed by scientists, pharmaceutical industries, and clinicians through literature survey on PubMed—a medical academic database, two clinical trials databases, and internet information published before February 16th, 2020. Then a system review and analysis on the development situations and trends about COVID-19 drugs and therapies were carried out. According to the documents published, scientists and doctors have focused on several possible categories of drugs, including: (1) Chemical compounds, such as nucleoside analogues, protease inhibitors, and other antiviral drugs with multiple mechanisms; (2) biologics, such as monoclonal antibodies, interferon, peptides, plasma of recovered patients and some new kinds of therapies; (3) traditional Chinese medicines, such as some syndrome differentiation therapies. Now, nearly 100 agents or therapies have entered into the clinic research processes and some of them have arrived at the IV phase of clinical trials. Due to the considerable previous experiences and understands that have been accumulated in the researches on SARS-nCoV, Ebola, MERS, and AIDS, with the help of advanced biotechnology and medical technology, scientists can respond faster than ever before, and have investigated a variety of potential treatment options. For example, Remdesivir, which was originally targeted at Ebola virus, Kaletra, which has been used for the treatment of AIDS, Chloroquine, a typical drug used as antimalarial long time ago, glucocorticoids, a common therapies method used to combat SARS, washed microbiota transplantation and Mesenchymal Stem Cell, emerging biological therapies, and combination of multiple drugs or combination of traditional Chinese medicines and modern medicines, are bringing hope to treat COVID-19. Now scientists have proposed several drug candidates (e.g., Remdesivir, Kaletra, Arbidol and Chloroquine) that could be the potential anti-coronavirus agents. All of these drugs are under study in the late phases of clinical trials. While Remdesivir and Kaletra have already shown positive effect on COVID-19 related disease at personalized level. Traditional Chinese Medicines treatment with syndrome differentiation combined with modern medicines also shows a good effect. A considerable number of candidate drugs have shown good results<italic> in vitro</italic> cell tests on COVID-19. Currently, the follow-up animal tests, toxicology tests, and human clinical trials are in progress at various stages. After a period of clinical application research and further validation research on the clinical effect, safety, dosage and indications of these candidate drugs, it is expected that more drugs with significant efficacy will emerge. Finally, we will defeat COVID-19, and the public will live in a healthy and peaceful world.