Treating COVID-19 with Chloroquine
Mingxing Huang, Tiantian Tang, Pengfei Pang, Man Li, Ruolan Ma, Jiahui Lu, Jingxian Shu, Yingying You, Binghui Chen, Jiabi Liang, Zhongsi Hong, Huili Chen, Ling Kong, Dajiang Qin, Duanqing Pei, Jinyu Xia, Shanping Jiang, Hong Shan
Journal of Molecular Cell Biology, doi:10.1093/jmcb/mjaa014
Treating COVID-19 with Chloroquine A novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) emerged around December 2019 in Wuhan, China and has spread rapidly worldwide (Lu et al., 2020). Until March 27, 2020, the Chinese health authorities had reported 82082 confirmed COVID-19 cases in China with 3298 deaths and 381443 confirmed cases with 20787 deaths outside China. The World Health Organization (WHO) named the virus SARS-CoV-2, which belongs to a distinct clade from the human severe acute respiratory syndrome CoV (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome CoV (MERS-CoV) (Zhu et al., 2020). At present, there is no effective therapy against this new virus. Identifying effective antiviral agents to treat the COVID-19 is of most urgency. Coronavirus relies on cellular machinery to replicate itself, thus providing a rationale to search for effective therapies among agents that may impact pathways required for the viral life cycle. The vesicular trafficking system plays a critical role in viral entry, unpacking, assembly, and packaging. Among agents that can interfere with normal vesicular trafficking are several drugs approved for human therapies. A well-known antimalaria drug, Chloroquine, stands out as one of the earliest reagents that can block vesicular trafficking and also interfere with the life cycle of parasites and viruses (Savarino
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