ABOUT US.

COVID-19 pandemic represents one of the deadliest and economically most consequential outbreaks in around 100 years. To date, only remdesivir (Gilead Sciences) has shown to possibly lower the time to recovery. In the past, developing antiviral agents has taken 5.9 years on average. In the current crisis, it appears feasible that this timeline will be significantly reduced if there were early signs of efficacy. Moreover, a candidate drug could be offered emergency use authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and similar designations by regulatory authorities across the world, as was the case with remdesivir.

Drug repurposing has been a successful strategy for a variety of therapeutic areas. In the case of COVID-19, compounds of interest include those that have previously been found to either be clinically efficacious or have in vitro activity against the coronaviruses that cause Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which share significant structural similarities with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Information on drugs potentially active against COVID-19 is expected to change rapidly as future studies will report. It is crucial that both researchers and health care providers are able to access the optimum and most up-to-date information to inform future or ongoing studies and provide clinical care.

The objectives for the current protocol are: 

    (1) to systematically review which existing medications have shown to be potentially effective             against SARS or MERS and could therefore be potentially repurposed;
    (2) to present the early evidence that supports testing readily available drugs against SARS-             CoV-2;
    (3) to provide the best available level of evidence for the efficacy of each individual candidate           drug; and
    (4) to report harmful effects associated with use of these drugs.