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Updated: Sep 22, 2025

Drug Repurposing Hypothesis Generation Using the "RE:fine Drugs" System
Published on: December 11, 2016
Drugs repurposing for SARS-CoV-2: new insight of COVID-19 druggability
Sujit Kumar Debnath1, Monalisha Debnath1, Rohit Srivastava1
1Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India.
Introduction:
The ongoing epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) creates a massive panic worldwide due to the absence of effective medicines. Developing a new drug or vaccine is time-consuming to pass safety and efficacy testing. Therefore, repurposing drugs have been introduced to treat COVID-19 until effective drugs are developed.
Area Covered:
A detailed search of repurposing drugs against SARS-CoV-2 was carried out using the PubMed database, focusing on articles published 2020 years onward. A different class of drugs has been described in this article to target hosts and viruses. Based on the previous pandemic experience of SARS-CoV and MERS, several antiviral and antimalarial drugs are discussed here. This review covers the failure of some repurposed drugs that showed promising activity in the earlier CoV-pandemic but were found ineffective against SARS-CoV-2. All these discussions demand a successful drug development strategy for screening and identifying an effective drug for better management of COVID-19.
Expert Opinion:
Repurposed drugs have been used since COVID-19 to eradicate disease propagation. Drugs found effective for MERS and SARS may not be effective against SARS-CoV-2. Drug libraries and artificial intelligence are helpful tools to screen and identify different molecules targeting viruses or hosts.
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