COVID-19: A Brief Overview of the Discovery Clinical Trial

Abstract

COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) is a worldwide outbreak of pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome. It is unambiguously linked to the human–human transmission of a novel coronavirus. Mutagenomic analyses demonstrated that 79.6% of the genome sequences were identical to those found in the coronavirus responsible for the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which spread in 2002. Hence the classification as 2019-nCoV (n for novel) and the name SARS-CoV-2. Combatting SARS-CoV-2 has emerged as a tremendous challenge, gathering efforts from academia, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, international organizations, as well as governments and philanthropic associations (e.g., The Council on Foundations). In this Opinion, we give a brief overview of some current and future clinical trials, as they can be found in the U.S. National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, MD, USA).