miRNAs; a novel strategy for the treatment of COVID‐19

Abstract

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) is the seventh member of the bat severe acute respiratory syndrome family. COVID‐19 can fuse their envelopes with the host cell membranes and deliver their genetic material. COVID‐19 attacks the respiratory system and stimulates the host inflammatory responses, enhances the recruitment of immune cells, and promotes angiotensin‐converting enzyme 2 activities. Patients with confirmed COVID‐19 may have experienced fever, dry cough, headache, dyspnea, acute kidney injury, acute respiratory distress syndrome, and acute heart injury. Several strategies such as oxygen therapy, ventilation, antibiotic or antiviral therapy, and renal replacement therapy are commonly used to decrease COVID‐19‐associated mortality. However, these approaches may not be good treatment options. Therefore, the search for an alternative‐novel therapy is urgently important to prevent the disease progression. Recently, microRNAs (miRNAs) have emerged as a promising strategy for COVID‐19. The design of oligonucleotide against the genetic material of COVID‐19 might suppress virus RNA translation. Several previous studies have shown that host miRNAs play an antiviral role and improve the treatment of patients with COVID‐19. miRNAs by binding to the 3′‐untranslated region (UTR) or 5′‐UTR of viral RNA play an important role in COVID‐19‐host interplay and viral replication. miRNAs interact with multiple pathways and reduce inflammatory biomarkers, thrombi formation, and tissue damage to accelerate the patient outcome. The information in this review provides a summary of the current clinical application of miRNAs for the treatments of patients with COVID‐19.

Evaluation of altered miRNA expression pattern to predict COVID-19 severity.

“…Recent reports indicate that miRNAs could be promising tools for early diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19 infection. This alternative novel therapy with miRNA regulation could prevent disease progression and severe condition [14]. The miRNAs identi ed in the present study could be used as potential biomarkers for identi cation of individuals who could be more prone to develop severe symptoms of COVID-19 as well as could be used as putative targets for developing treatment strategies for COVID-19 in future.…”

“…Host miRNA expression can be important anti-viral tool [11] as they stimulate immune response [12] by mediating T cells and antiviral effector functions [13]. Thus miRNA biomarkers could be an alternate treatment strategy for COVID-19 [14]. In addition, pathogeneis of several human diseases are associated with dysregulation of miRNAs and biological processes controlled by these miRNAs.…”

Role of microRNAs in COVID-19 with implications for therapeutics

“…The genome of SARS-CoV-2 comprises a variable number of open reading frames (ORFs) with 5’ and 3’ flanking UTRs which code for accessory proteins, structural proteins including spike (S), membrane (M), and envelope (E) and nucleocapsid (N) along with 16 nonstructural proteins (nsps), which are encoded by the first ORF (ORF1/ab) through a frameshift mutation producing pp1 a and ab ( Fig. 1 ) [16] , [17] . Viral chymotrypsin-like protease (3CLpro) or the main protease (Mpro) and one or two papain-like proteases, play key roles in translational processing of these two polypeptides and convert them into 16 nsps.…”

“Multiomics” Approaches to Understand and Treat COVID-19: Mass Spectrometry and Next-Generation Sequencing

“…Other factors that have previously been associated with epigenetic regulations of gene expression, disease, and recently implicated in COVID-19 are microRNA (miRNA) [161][162][163][164][165] and competitive endogenous RNA (ceRNA) [166][167][168][169]. miRNA has been associated with active COVID-19 infection with several molecular species upregulated (e.g., miR-31-5p) and down regulated [164].…”