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 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, EC50, and/or IC50. Due to the containment of the prior epidemics, however, these were largely not followed up with animal studies or clinical investigations and thus overlooked as treatment prospects in the current COVID-19 trials. This brief review summarizes and tabulates core information on the dozens of clinical trials currently in progress, while detailing the most promising untested candidates with prior documented success against the etiologic agents of SARS and/or MERS.
Keywords: COVID-19, drug repositioning, pandemics, antiviral agents, data mining, SARS