Medication therapy strategies for the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19): recent progress and challenges

ABSTRACT

Introduction

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has spread globally since it outbroke in December 2019. The urgent pandemic presents an unprecedented challenge to develop and identify effective medication therapy strategies to combat the COVID-19.

Areas covered

Here, we summarized and evaluated the current treatment drugs and regimens, and put forward the treatment recommendations, including using the potential repurposed or experimental drugs against COVID-19, e.g. chloroquine (CQ), hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), lopinavir/ritonavir (LPV/r), remdesivir (RDV), and favipiravir (FPV). We also analyzed the specific drugs and vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 ongoing development and formulated the comprehensive treatment regimens based on condition of patients, diseases and drugs as well as concomitant medications.

Expert opinion

No drugs and vaccines have been proven to be particularly effective against SARS-CoV-2 up to now. The recommended comprehensive medication therapy strategies have already displayed favorable effect in the fight against COVID-19. Research should be focused on the development of anti-SARS-CoV-2 drugs and vaccines based on high-quality clinical trial evidence, treatment guidelines and expert consensus.

KEYWORDS:

• Coronavirus disease
• COVID-19
• SARS-CoV-2
• medication therapy
• therapeutic strategies

Article highlights

• The urgent pandemic presents an unprecedented challenge to develop and identify effective therapy strategies to combat the COVID-19.

• The current potential drugs and vaccines against COVID-19 based on therapeutic strategies and drug targets were summarized, evaluated and recommended.

• The ongoing registered clinical trial drugs for treatment and prevention of COVID-19 are summarized and evaluated.

• The comprehensive therapeutic regimens, based on clinical trial evidence, treatment guidelines, and expert consensus, were summarized, evaluated and recommended.

• The recommended medication therapy strategies against COVID-19 have achieved relatively favorable effect up to now.

Contributors

Xiaolei Yang and Ye Liu (the co-first authors) contributed equally to this work. Guo Ma contributed to the design and revision of the manuscript. The other authors contributed to the statistical analysis of data and literature search.

Declaration of interest

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Reviewer declarations

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was funded by the National Natural Science Funds of China [81873078, 81374051].