Open AccessDrug repurposing strategies for COVID-19
Author(s) -
Suranga L Senanayake
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
future drug discovery
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2631-3316
DOI - 10.4155/fdd-2020-0010
Subject(s) - repurposing , drug repositioning , covid-19 , pandemic , drug , medicine , intensive care medicine , risk analysis (engineering) , internet privacy , business , pharmacology , computer science , virology , engineering , outbreak , infectious disease (medical specialty) , disease , pathology , waste management
COVID-19 has now been declared a pandemic and new treatments are urgently needed as we enter a phase beyond containment. Developing new drugs from scratch is a lengthy process, thus impractical to face the immediate global challenge. Drug repurposing is an emerging strategy where existing medicines, having already been tested safe in humans, are redeployed to combat difficult-to-treat diseases. While using such repurposed drugs individually may ultimately not yield a significant clinical benefit, carefully combined cocktails could be very effective, as was for HIV in the 1990s; the urgent question now being which combination.