In vitro inhibition of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus by chloroquine

By E. Keyaerts, L. Vijgen, Piet Maes, J. Neyts, M. Ranst. Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications - BBRC, 2004

616 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report on chloroquine, a 4-amino-quinoline, as an effective inhibitor of the replication of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in vitro. Chloroquine is a clinically approved drug effective against malaria. We tested chloroquine phosphate for its antiviral potential against SARS-CoV-induced cytopathicity in Vero E6 cell culture. Results indicate that the IC50 of chloroquine for antiviral activity (8.8 ± 1.2 μM) was significantly lower than its cytostatic activity; CC50 (261.3 ± 14.5 μM), yielding a selectivity index of 30. The IC50 of chloroquine for inhibition of SARS-CoV in vitro approximates the plasma concentrations of chloroquine reached during treatment of acute malaria. Addition of chloroquine to infected cultures could be delayed for up to 5 h postinfection, without an important drop in antiviral activity. Chloroquine, an old antimalarial drug, may be considered for immediate use in the prevention and treatment of SARS-CoV infections.

Subfields: Computational Theory and Mathematics, Infectious Diseases

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1854d80a095c32aaa524e50d07756a51493d5917

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Citations in the corpus

• Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus as an Agent of Emerging and Reemerging Infection (2007, background): “Protease inhibitors (especially nelfinavir) (386, 392), glycyrrhizin (77), baicalin (50), reserpine (381), aescin (381), valinomycin (381), niclosamide (380), aurintricarboxylic acid (129), mizoribine (293), indomethacin (4), chloroquine (174), and many herbal formulations, have also been found to p”
• Current Status of Epidemiology, Diagnosis, Therapeutics, and Vaccines for Novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) (2020, background): “Previous studies determined the antiviral activity of chloroquine against SARS, MERS, HIV, Ebola, Hendra, and Nipah viruses in vitro [51-54].”
• Screening of an FDA-Approved Compound Library Identifies Four Small-Molecule Inhibitors of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus Replication in Cell Culture (2014, background): “Next, these drugs, as well as the earlier 193 reported coronavirus inhibitor chloroquine (51-55), were tested over a broader concentration 194”
• In Vitro Antiviral Activity and Projection of Optimized Dosing Design of Hydroxychloroquine for the Treatment of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) (2020, background): “Chloroquine is a widely used anti-malarial with immunomodulatory effects [1-5].”
• Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as available weapons to fight COVID-19 (2020, positive): “Regarding viruses, for reasons probably partly identical involving alkalinisation by chloroquine of the phagolysosome, several studies have shown the effectiveness of this molecule, including against coronaviruses among which is the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-associated coronavirus [1,”