Drugs that Might Be Possibly Used for Treatment of COVID-19 Patients

Abstract

The drug development process for Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is the research process to create a preventive vaccine or therapeutic prescription drug to relieve the severity of 2019-2020 (COVID-19). In different stages of preclinical or clinical research, several hundred special scientific research centers, research organizations, and health agencies have developed and tried enormous numbers of vaccine candidates and new drugs for COVID-19 disease. In order to identify new therapies against COVID-19, several clinical trials have been in progress worldwide.

Keywords: Coronavirus disease; Favipiravir; Losartan; drug development process; trial of treatments.

Fig. 1.

According to World Health Organization (WHO) statistics, the situation of coronavirus disease in the European Region (COVID-19) was reported on May 4, 2020 (only countries with more than 5000 cases at that time are reported in the graph) [8].

Fig. 2.

The drug discovery cycle process.

Fig. 3.

(a) Chemical composition of EIDD-2801, a ribonucleoside isopropyl ester prodrug analog of β-D-N⁴-hydroxycytidine. EIDD-2801 is a nucleoside derivative orally bioavailable for SARS-CoV-2 that is being created. Its activation to the corresponding tri-phosphorylated form showing a broad-spectrum antiviral activity against different RNA viruses, including coronaviruses with Remdesivir resistance mutations, is also shown. (b) There are two variants of the active form: the oxime form that imitates uridine and adenosine pairs, while the other tautomer imitates cytidine and guanosine pairs. The medicine inevitably leads to a tragedy of viral malfunction.

Fig. 4.

Chemical structure and active form of the prodrug remdesivir (RDV), GS-441524.

Fig. 5.

Chemical structure of chloroquine (a) and hydroxychloroquine (b) ADME profile was achieved using the free web tool SwissADME. the red highlighted area represents the suitable physicochemical space for oral bioavailability, covering value intervals for the following: LIPO (lipophility): −0.7 < XLOGP3 < +5.0, SIZE: 150 g/mol < MW < 500 g/mol, POLAR (polarity): 20 Å² < TPSA < 130 Ų, INSOLU (insolubility): 0 < Log S (ESOL) < 6, INSATU (insaturation): 0.25 < Fraction Csp3 < 1, FLEX (flexibility): 0 < Num. rotatable bonds < 9, whereas the overlapped green highlighted area shows the calculated ADME profile for the molecule [23].

Fig. 6.

Protein chemical formula of tocilizumab.