Hot Topic Commentary on COVID-19
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COMMENTARY
Hot Topic Commentary on COVID-19 Ah-Ng Kong 1
&
Andy T. Y. Lau 2 & Luigi Brunetti 3,4
# Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract The recent pandemic outbreak of COVID-19 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2; SARS-CoV-2) worldwide caught the health care systems in every country around the world by storm and without a proper defense mechanism to cope and control such a pandemic. In this special Theme issue, we would like to discuss the latest treatment modalities available around the world in tackling this dreadful disease. Keywords Coronavirus . COVID-19 . SARS-CoV-2 . Drugs for COVID-19
The recent pandemic outbreak of COVID-19 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2; SARS-CoV-2) worldwide caught the health care systems in every country around the world by storm and without a proper defense mechanism to cope and control such a pandemic. In this special Theme issue, we would like to discuss the latest treatment modalities available around the world in tackling this dreadful disease. COVID-19 is caused by a novel coronavirus severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and has been identified and characterized [1]. SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh coronavirus known to infect humans with some coronavirus SARS-CoV, Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), and SARS-CoV-2-caused severe diseases, whereas other coronavirus HKU1, NL63, OC43, and 229E were associated with mild clinical symptoms [2]. SARS-CoV-2 is a single-stranded RNA virus with 29,891 bases, shares 79.6% sequence identity to SARS-CoV, and is 96% identical at the whole-genome level to a bat coronavirus * Ah-Ng Kong [email protected] 1
Department of Pharmaceutics, Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy, Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey, 160 Frelinghuysen Road, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA
2
Laboratory of Cancer Biology and Epigenetics, Department of Cell Biology and Genetics, Shantou University Medical College, Shantou 515041, Guangdong, China
3
Department of Pharmacy Practice, Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA
4
Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Somerset, Somerville, NJ 08876, USA
[1]. SARS-CoV-2 appears to encode 29 proteins and the receptor-binding spike protein encoded by the S gene containing the receptor-binding domain (RBD), which binds directly to the human of angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), promotes membrane fusion, and uptakes of the virus into human cells including the lung [1, 3, 4]. Upon entering the human cells, SARS-CoV-2 like other coronaviruses will hijack the cellular protein synthesis machinery to synthesize and assemble the viral proteins with subsequent viral replication [5]. In the human body, viruses in general will trigger a series of good versus bad host responses including autophagy, apoptosis, stress response, and innate immunity [6]. More than 80% of SARS-CoV-2 infected individuals would be asymptomatic to mild symptom (this percentage could be higher, since many infected asymptomatic people were not
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