Pharmacological strategies to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection and to treat the early phases of COVID-19 disease

On 11th March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the first pandemic due to the spreading of SARS-CoV-2, a novel positive-sense, single-stranded RNA betacoronavirus identified in humans in December 2019 in China, causing the COVID-19 disease (Wang et al., 2020a; Zhou et al., 2020b). In the last years, 6 other outbreaks caused by coronavirus have been identified in humans, among them the SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV diseases have been found as the most pathogenic (Kuiken et al., 2003; Zaki et al., 2012; Zhong et al., 2003) and more recently the SARS-CoV-2 using the same cellular receptor as SARS-CoV, namely human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (hACE2) (Tai et al., 2020).
Source: International Journal of Infectious Diseases - Category: Infectious Diseases Authors: Tags: Review Source Type: research