How Science Can Help Treat and Prevent COVID-19

What can medical research deliver — and when?

Photo by Bill Oxford on Unsplash

The medical research community is collaborating in unprecedented ways, and working overtime, to fight COVID-19. Academics, public health agencies, biotech, and big pharma are working together to repurpose existing drugs, develop new therapies and protect us with new vaccines. What can we expect them to deliver — and when?

Here is a glimpse of the “pandemic pipeline”:

1) Repurposed drugs

The nearest term option to help patients with severe cases of COVID-19 lies in thoughtful use of our existing toolkit — the drugs that we already have. Physicians around the world, desperate to save their dying patients, are leading the charge in experimenting with the use of existing drugs to fight COVID-19 ( “off label” use).

The top COVID-19 candidates target either the virus (e.g, Remesdivir, Lopinavir / Ritonavir (Kaletra), or Chloroquine / Hydroxychloroquine — an anti-malarial) or the immune system response (e.g. Tocilizumab, an anti-inflammatory). The latter strategy stems from the observation that some patients experience harmful immune system over-reactions (e.g. “cytokine storm syndrome”).