Natural products and their derivatives against coronavirus: A review of the non‐clinical and pre‐clinical data

Abstract

Several corona viral infections have created serious threats in the last couple of decades claiming the death of thousands of human beings. Recently, corona viral epidemic raised the issue of developing effective antiviral agents at the earliest to prevent further losses. Natural products have always played a crucial role in drug development process against various diseases, which resulted in screening of such agents to combat emergent mutants of corona virus. This review focuses on those natural compounds that showed promising results against corona viruses. Although inhibition of viral replication is often considered as a general mechanism for antiviral activity of most of the natural products, studies have shown that some natural products can interact with key viral proteins that are associated with virulence. In this context, some of the natural products have antiviral activity in the nanomolar concentration (e.g., lycorine, homoharringtonine, silvestrol, ouabain, tylophorine, and 7‐methoxycryptopleurine) and could be leads for further drug development on their own or as a template for drug design. In addition, a good number of natural products with anti‐corona virus activity are the major constituents of some common dietary supplements, which can be exploited to improve the immunity of the general population in certain epidemics.

Natural Flavonoids as Potential Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme 2 Inhibitors for Anti-SARS-CoV-2

“…Natural products such as flavonoids, xanthones, proanthocyanidins, secoiridoids, and peptides were reported to contain anti-ACE activity; however, further research is needed to confirm the findings [ 24 ]. Table 1 summarizes the natural compounds that were reported to have inhibitory effects on ACE1 and ACE2 receptors.…”

“…Tocilizumab was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to manage cytokine release syndrome (CRS) in patients receiving chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy. This drug was shown to reduce toxicity and improve immune-related toxicity [ 24 , 25 ]. Tocilizumab can block the activity of proinflammatory interleukin-6 (IL-6), which is involved in the pathogenesis of pneumonia that causes death in COVID-19 patients [ 26 ].…”

High-Content Screening of Thai Medicinal Plants Reveals Boesenbergia rotunda Extract and its Component Panduratin A as Anti-SARS-CoV-2 Agents

“…This technique has proven to be valuable and in uential in discovering molecules with desired biological functions in a relevant cell-based setting. 26 Due to the urgent scenario and the prospective potential of phytochemicals as an alternative treatment against novel coronavirus as demonstrated by a relevant study on their anti-SARS-CoV activities, 22,27 it has prompted us to develop, for the rst time, a high-content screening platform to investigate the in vitro potential of locally obtained natural extracts and compounds found in Thai medicinal plants against SARS-CoV-2.…”

anti-HCoV: A web resource to collect natural compounds against human coronaviruses

“…Last, in 2020, Islam et al ( Islam et al, 2020 ) provided a list of 123 natural compounds useful against CoVs infections. Thanks to a massive research with proper keywords in articles from public literature databases, they considered studies on crude extracts, fractions or preparations from plants, microorganisms or marine species, that demonstrated an action against CoVs.…”

“…Thanks to a massive research with proper keywords in articles from public literature databases, they considered studies on crude extracts, fractions or preparations from plants, microorganisms or marine species, that demonstrated an action against CoVs. They excluded data duplication and titles or contents that did not meet the criteria of showing anti-viral activities against CoVs ( Islam et al, 2020 ). From their list we selected the 78 natural compounds that act on the virus absorption and replication, among which 64 were new in our collection ( Table S1 ).…”