Proposed therapies and vaccine developing for COVID-19 (SARS CoV-2)

COVID-19 or Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), is the third spillover of animal coronavirus to humans, resulting in a major respiratory epidemic in less than two decades. In March, 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) called this respiratory infectious disease as a “Pandemic Outbreaks”, unfortunately, no drug or vaccine has yet been approved to treat COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2). About 3.5 million confirmed cases and more than 240 thousand deaths worldwide were reported from this respiratory pandemic by May 03, 2020. This outbreak pushed the researchers and physicians to use “Drug repositioning strategy”, in a trail to stop this pandemic infection until developing the suitable vaccination, which in best circumstances will not be available before January, 2021. A lot of drugs that have been previously developed as antiviral medications such as; Favipiravir, Ribavirin, Lopinavir/Ritonavir and Remdesivir, or other drugs used as antimalarial agents including; Chloroquine and Hydroxyl Chloroquine, are being tested for treating COVID-19. Along with the physician that aim to face this outbreak by using drugs already in market and try to repurpose it, the developer in drug design field also race against time, to find a new drug for COVID-19 beginning from drug design in silico, ending with clinical trials. More than 79 worldwide research companies/institutions in cooperation with many governmental sides, are working together to find a suitable vaccine for this virus, using many platform for vaccine discovery such as; mRNA, DNA, inactivated virus, attenuated virus, subunits and recombinant proteins. However, scientists believe that under the best condition, the vaccine will not be available before January, 2021. The aims of this review were to express the main trials for COVID-19 treatment via drug repositioning, as well as the movement of the companies and the different organizations towards finding a suitable active vaccine, before the crisis become improbable.