Abstract:
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. © 2022 informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group.