Are promising mechanisms of hydroxychloroquine abolish COVID-19 activity? A review study

Abstract

To explore the benefits of Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), (which is an antimalarial agent that has shown effective pharmacological properties in different malarial conditions and immunological disorders, particularity in chloroquine-sensitive malaria), in the treatment and prevention of Corona Virus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic because HCQ was recently advocated to minimize the pathogenicity of COVID-19. The aim of this review is to shed the light on a possible mechanism by which HCQ can defeat the COVID-19, a disease characterized by the WHO as a pandemic. Literatures from Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, Science Direct and Google Scholar were cast-off to search the literature data. The keywords used are antimalarial agent, COVID-19, Hydroxychloroquine, SARS-CoV-2 and Zinc sulfate.The review summarizes the benefits of using HCQ against COVID-19 through exploiting the ability of this antimalarial agent in ameliorating the body immunity, inhibiting and/or delaying the viral glycosylation by increasing the pH inside the host cell and also via suppressing the viral transcription and replication through the formation of a complex structure after binding with zinc. We concluded thatthese interfering properties of HCQ support human immunity to fight against the progression of COVID-19. We hypothesize that the therapeutic efficiency of HCQ against the COVID-19 can be enhanced by the concurrent administration of zinc sulfate.

Keywords

• antimalarial agent
• covid-19
• hydroxychloroquine
• sars-cov-2
• zinc sulfate