Breakthrough: Chloroquine phosphate has shown apparent efficacy in treatment of COVID-19 associated pneumonia in clinical studies
Jianjun Gao, Zhenxue Tian, Xu Yang
BioScience Trends, doi:10.5582/bst.2020.01047
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) virus, emerged in December 2019, has spread rapidly, with cases now confirmed in multiple countries. As of February 16, 2020, the virus has caused 70,548 infections and 1,770 deaths in mainland China and 413 infections in Japan (1). A great deal of effort has been made to find effective drugs against the virus in China (2). On February 17, 2020, the State Council of China held a news briefing indicating that chloroquine phosphate, an old drug for treatment of malaria, had demonstrated marked efficacy and acceptable safety in treating COVID-19 associated pneumonia in multicenter clinical trials conducted in China (3). In the early in vitro studies, chloroquine was found to block COVID-19 infection at low-micromolar concentration, with a half-maximal effective concentration (EC 50 ) of 1.13 μM and a half-cytotoxic concentration (CC 50 ) greater than 100 μM (4). A number of subsequent clinical trials (ChiCTR2000029939,
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