Translational Medical Research Commons^™

Chloroquine: Autophagy Inhibitor, Antimalarial, Bitter Taste Receptor Agonist In Fight Against Covid-19, A Reality Check?, Pawan Sharma, Kielan D. Mcalinden, Saeid Ghavami, Deepak A. Deshpande

Center for Translational Medicine Faculty Papers

The recent SARS-CoV-2 pandemic poses one of the greatest challenges to modern medicine. Therefore, identification of new therapeutic strategies seems essential either based on novel vaccines or drugs or simply repurposing existing drugs. Notably, due to their known safety profile, repurposing of existing drugs is the fastest and highly efficient approach to bring a therapeutic to a clinic for any new indication. One such drug that has been used extensively for decades is chloroquine (CQ, with its derivatives) either for malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. Accumulating body of evidence from experimental pharmacology suggests that CQ and related analogues also activate …