Letter to the editor: Comment on GLP-1-based drugs and COVID-19 treatment

• 作者: Mingyao Liu Tianru Jin
• 来源期刊: 药学学报（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2020,（7）
• 所属期刊栏目: Letters to the Editor
• 页码范围: 1249-1250
• 页数: 2页
• 语种: 英文

摘要

To the Editor: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is now spreading over 187 countries or territories, taking away hundreds to thousands of lives each day.The lack of specific and effective therapeutics is the major challenge in dealing with patients that are suffering from severe symptoms, i.e., acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS).Drug development with conventional drugdiscovery pipelines will not meet the immediate needs.Thus, it is essential and urgent to develop repurposed therapeutics.Furthermore, type 2 diabetes (T2D) is one of the major comorbidities of COVID-19 patients who developed ARDS1,2.Treatment of those patients represents additional complexities.Since T2D therapeutic agents known as glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1)-based drugs possess the strong anti-inflammatory effect in the lung and elsewhere, we suggest that these drugs are among potential repurposed drugs for COVID-19.We also suggest that large scale retrospective studies should be conduced, which may reveal whether administration of this type of drugs have beneficial effects on clinical outcomes of T2D patients who suffered from COVID-19, with or without ARDS.