Drug repurposing strategies for COVID-19 #MMPMIDC7117595
Senanayake SL
Future Drug Discov ä[]; ä (ä): ä PMIDC7117595show ga
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.