Beneficial effects exerted by hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID-19 patients via protecting multiple organs

Abstract: SCIENCE CHINA Life Sciences •LETTER TO THE EDITOR• February 2021 Vol.64 No.2: 330–333 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11427-020-1782-1 Beneficial effects exerted by hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID-19 patients via protecting multiple organs 1 1 1 2 2,3* Bo Yu , Chenze Li , Peng Chen , Jia Li , Hualiang Jiang 1 & Dao-Wen Wang 1* Division of Cardiology, Department of Internal Medicine and Hubei Key Laboratory of Genetics and Molecular Mechanisms of Cardiological Disorders, Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430030, China; State Key Laboratory of Drug Research, Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 201203, China; 3 Shanghai Institute for Advanced Immunochemical Studies and School of Life Science and Technology, Shanghai Tech University, Shanghai 2 201210, China Received May 10, 2020; accepted July 25, 2020; published online August 3, 2020 Citation: Yu, B., Li, C., Chen, P., Li, J., Jiang, H., and Wang, D.W. (2021). Beneficial effects exerted by hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID-19 patients via protecting multiple organs. Sci China Life Sci 64, 330–333. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11427-020-1782-1 Dear Editor, The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by widespread infection with the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) (Chen et al., 2020; Guan et al., 2020) has led to a global health crisis. More than 3.5 million infections and 246,838 deaths have occurred as of May 4, 2020 (Saqrane and El Mhammedi, 2020), with a rapid upward trend. Many COVID-19 patients suffer from complicated systemic injuries such as cardiac (Chen et al., 2020) and hepatic (Huang et al., 2020) damages. There are currently no specific drugs on the market to treat COVID-19-induced systemic injuries (Ni et al., 2020). A study by our group has demonstrated that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) administration dramatically reduces the fatality of critically ill COVID-19 patients (Yu et al., 2020). In the present study, we investigated whether HCQ treatment has the ability to protect multiple organs from injuries caused by SARS-CoV-2. In this retrospective study, we extracted data of 2,882 patients (1,427 males and 1,455 females) who were clinically confirmed to have COVID-19 between February 1, 2020, and April 4, 2020, at the Tongji Hospital, Wuhan, China *Corresponding authors (Dao-Wen Wang, email: dwwang@tjh.tjmu.edu.cn; Hualiang Jiang, email: hljiang@simm.ac.cn) (IRBID: TJ-IRB20200229). The median age of all the patients was 62 (50–69) years. Of the 2,882 patients, 550 were diagnosed as critically ill and 2,332 as non-critically ill COVID-19 patients. Additionally, 278 patients (48 critical and 230 non-critical) received oral HCQ treatment (200 mg twice a day) for 7–10 days and comprised the HCQ group; the remaining 2,604 patients did not receive the HCQ treatment and comprised the NHCQ group (Figure S1 in Supporting Information). In all the HCQ-treated patients, the median time to start HCQ administration was 10 (5–15) days after hospitalization. The baseline characteristics of the patients in these two groups are listed in Table S1 in Supporting Information. In total, of the 2,882 COVID-19 patients, 247 died (fatality rate, 8.6%); all the deaths occurred in critically ill patients (44.9%), including 9/48 (18.8%) patients from the HCQ group and 238/502 (47.4%) patients from the NHCQ group (P<0.001) (Yu et al., 2020). In the HCQ..