Potential drug development and therapeutic approaches for clinical intervention in COVID-19.

While the vaccination is now available to many countries and will slowly dissipate to others, effective therapeutics for COVID-19 is still illusive. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has posed an unprecedented challenge to researchers, scientists, and clinicians and affected the wellbeing of millions of people worldwide. Since the beginning of the pandemic, a multitude of existing anti-viral, antibiotic, antimalarial, and anticancer drugs have been tested, and some have shown potency in the treatment and management of COVID-19, albeit others failed to leave any positive impact and a few also became controversial as they showed mixed clinical outcomes. In the present article, we have brought together some of the candidate therapeutic drugs being repurposed or used in the clinical trials and discussed their clinical efficacy and safety for COVID-19.

Step toward repurposing drug discovery for COVID-19 therapeutics through in silico approach.

The outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 has become a threat to global health and has led to a global economic crisis. Although the researchers worldwide are putting tremendous effort toward gaining more insights into this zoonotic virus and developing vaccines and therapeutic drugs, no vaccine or drug is yet available to combat COVID-19 effectively. Drug discovery is often a laborious, time-consuming, and expensive task. In this time of crisis, employing computational methods could provide a feasible alternative approach that can potentially be used for drug discovery. Therefore, a library of several antiparasitic and anti-inflammatory drugs was virtually screened against SARS-CoV-2 proteases to identify potential inhibitors. The identified inhibitory drugs were further analyzed to confirm their activities against SARS-CoV-2. Our results could prove to be helpful in repurposing the drug discovery approach, which could substantially reduce the expenses, time, and resources required.