2.1 Potential drug compounds
There are three lines of drug discovery approach to develop the novel
drug for 2019-nCoV. These three approaches leading to the potential
treatment options include drug repurposing, screening molecular
databases using drug design tools and screening compound libraries in
antiviral assays. By the time required to randomly screen the natural or
chemical compound libraries, the third option is not compatible with the
rapid rate of 2019-nCoV transmission in the community. Therefore, drug
repurposing and computational docking analysis are the two main current
approaches to find potential drugs for the treatment of 2019-nCoV.
The efficiency of seven antiviral drugs (ribavirin, penciclovir,
nitazoxanide, nafamostat, chloroquine (CQ) remdesivir (RDV, GS-5734) and
favipiravir (T-705) against a clinical isolate of 2019-nCoV are so far
evaluated in the wet lab. These drugs have previously exhibited
broad-spectrum antiviral activity against a diverse panel of RNA viruses
such as SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and Ebola virus (EBOV) (GarcĂa-Serradilla et
al., 2019). The recently investigated potential anti-2019-nCoV described
in repurposing programs are summarized in Table 1. The cell culture
investigations showed that the compounds chloroquine (CQ) and remdesivir
(RDV) potently blocked virus infection at low-micromolar concentration
with a high selectivity index (SI) (Wang et al., 2020).