Remdesivir may not be a magic bullet for COVID-19 from pharmaceutical
perspective
Abstract
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by the severe acute
respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has become the global
pandemic and caused hundreds of thousands of people died in the world,
which is in urgent need to develop new drug therapy and pathogen
progressive information. Although abundant anti-viral drugs has been
directly practiced in some patients, there are no specific drug
treatment due to the new SARS-CoV-2 virus, which cause great disaster
and panic all over the world. Remdesivir has been recently a strong
candidate for the treatment of COVID-19. Recently, due to the support of
antiviral experiments in vitro and a case report by compassionate use of
the drug, remdesivir has been a promising candidate treatment for the
treatment of COVID-19. As a broad-spectrum anti-viral compound targeting
the viral RNA dependent RNA polymerase, remdesivir has been shown to
suppress the coronavirus, such as SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV. However, is
remdesivir really a magic bullet for COVID-19, also a coronavirus? In
this article, we first overview the general information about SARS-CoV-2
and its potential suppressing drug remdesivir. Then, we carefully
discussed the limitation with the remdesivir antiviral study, including
the case report by compassionate use of remdesivir. Finally, from the
pharmaceutical perspective we explored the anti-virus capability of
remdesivir against different viruses to see whether it’s a magic bullet
for COVID-19. Therefore, this paper provides crucial evidence and
objective theoretical basis on remdesivir to cure COVID-19 infections.