Repositioning of Drugs as a Promising Strategy to Fight COVID-19

Background and Objective: With the initial case of corona reported in Wuhan, China on 31st December 2020, there has been an unprecedented rise in the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), with over 200 countries all across the world in less than 3 months. By the October 2020, about 40 million population of the world got infected and over one million deaths occurred. Since no WHO and FDA approved medications or vaccines for COVID-19 were available, there was an impatient bustling need to develop a drug for the treatment. Drug repurposing emerged as the easiest and fast emerging strategy to get medicine for COVID-19 with rapid approvals for the clinical trials. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the status of drug repurposing under the clinical and its impact on the development of medicine for COVID-19. Methodology: The study was undertaken to review various clinical trials from the website. www.clinicaltrials.gov . We evaluated 220 ongoing clinical trials with the strategy of ‘drug repurposing’ against COVID-19, analyzed them as per their chemical structure and possible biological targets. Results: It was noticed that some of the early repurposed drugs like chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine, ACE inhibitors and ARBs, did not succeed and remained controversial. While many of the antiviral drugs like remdesivir, favipiravir, lopinavir, ritonavir, oseltamivir could be taken for the clinical trials in various countries, remdesivir could succeed to a great extent as compared to other drugs. WHO has come up with an initiative known as multi-country ‘Solidarity Trial’ for developing a potential drug or therapy against COVID-19.However, the most preferred drugs used for repurposing like hydroxychloroquine and remdesivir have not shown predictable results in solidarity trials. Conclusions: The analyses of several ongoing and partially concluded clinical trials suggest that drug repurposing can be one of the major strategies for the treatment of COVID-19. Further, guidelines framed by the WHO through Infection Prevention and Control for monitoring the widespread of this COVID-19 across the world is another aggressive attempt to find the solution for the treatment for COVID-19.