2.1 Potential drug compounds
There are three lines of drug discovery approach to develop the novel drug for 2019-nCoV. These three approaches leading to the potential treatment options include drug repurposing, screening molecular databases using drug design tools and screening compound libraries in antiviral assays. By the time required to randomly screen the natural or chemical compound libraries, the third option is not compatible with the rapid rate of 2019-nCoV transmission in the community. Therefore, drug repurposing and computational docking analysis are the two main current approaches to find potential drugs for the treatment of 2019-nCoV.
The efficiency of seven antiviral drugs (ribavirin, penciclovir, nitazoxanide, nafamostat, chloroquine (CQ) remdesivir (RDV, GS-5734) and favipiravir (T-705) against a clinical isolate of 2019-nCoV are so far evaluated in the wet lab. These drugs have previously exhibited broad-spectrum antiviral activity against a diverse panel of RNA viruses such as SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and Ebola virus (EBOV) (GarcĂ­a-Serradilla et al., 2019). The recently investigated potential anti-2019-nCoV described in repurposing programs are summarized in Table 1. The cell culture investigations showed that the compounds chloroquine (CQ) and remdesivir (RDV) potently blocked virus infection at low-micromolar concentration with a high selectivity index (SI) (Wang et al., 2020).