Repurposing Approved Drugs for Guiding COVID-19 Prophylaxis: A Systematic Review

Bruno Silva Andrade; Fernanda de Souza Rangel; Naiane Oliveira Santos; Andria Dos Santos Freitas; Wagner Rodrigues de Assis Soares; Sérgio Siqueira; Debmalya Barh; Aristóteles Góes-Neto; Alexander Birbrair; Vasco Ariston de Carvalho Azevedo

doi:10.3389/fphar.2020.590598

Repurposing Approved Drugs for Guiding COVID-19 Prophylaxis: A Systematic Review

Front Pharmacol. 2020 Dec 14:11:590598. doi: 10.3389/fphar.2020.590598. eCollection 2020.

Affiliations

¹ Laboratório de Bioinformática e Química Computacional, Departamento de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia (UESB), Jequié, Brazil.
² Programa de Pós-graduação em Genética e Biologia Molecular, Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz, Ilhéus, Brazil.
³ Departamento de Saúde II, Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia, Jequié, Brazil.
⁴ Centre for Genomics and Applied Gene Technology, Institute of Integrative Omics and Applied Biotechnology (IIOAB), Purba Medinipur, India.
⁵ Laboratório de Biologia Molecular e Computacional de Fungos, Departamento de Microbiologia, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
⁶ Departamento de Patologia, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
⁷ Laboratório de Genética Celular e Molecular, Departamento de Biologia Geral, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

Abstract

The SARS-CoV-2 outbreak originally appeared in China in December 2019 and became a global pandemic in March 2020. This infectious disease has directly affected public health and the world economy. Several palliative therapeutic treatments and prophylaxis strategies have been used to control the progress of this viral infection, including pre-(PrEP) and post-exposure prophylaxis. On the other hand, research groups around the world are still studying novel drug prophylaxis and treatment using repurposing approaches, as well as vaccination options, which are in different pre-clinical and clinical testing phases. This systematic review evaluated 1,228 articles from the PubMed and Scopus indexing databases, following the Kitchenham bibliographic searching protocol, with the aim to list drug candidates, potentially approved to be used as new options for SARS-CoV-2 prophylaxis clinical trials and medical protocols. In searching protocol, we used the following keywords: "Covid-19 or SARS-CoV-2" or "Coronavirus or 2019 nCoV," "prophylaxis," "prophylactic," "pre-exposure," "COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2 Chemoprophylaxis," "repurposed," "strategies," "clinical," "trials," "anti-SARS-CoV-2," "anti-covid-19," "Antiviral," "Therapy prevention in vitro," in cells "and" human testing. After all protocol steps, we selected 60 articles that included: 15 studies with clinical data, 22 studies that used in vitro experiments, seven studies using animal models, and 18 studies performed with in silico experiments. Additionally, we included more 22 compounds between FDA approved drugs and drug-like like molecules, which were tested in large-scale screenings, as well as those repurposed approved drugs with new mechanism of actions. The drugs selected in this review can assist clinical studies and medical guidelines on the rational repurposing of known antiviral drugs for COVID-19 prophylaxis.

Keywords: COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; antiviral; drug repurposing; prophylaxis.

Publication types

Review