COVID-19 Therapeutics – A landscape analysis using systematic reviews and clinical data

Abstract

2020 was a very unusual year due the COVID-19 pandemic that has caused many fatalities and is disrupting practically every aspect of our lives. It is unprecedented to see PubMed literature entries on a subject go from 0 to ~ 90,000 in a year. This effect is a direct result of the necessity of the scientific community to share data and insights generated worldwide. One of the potential unintended consequences of the sheer volume of literature in such a short amount of time is that many of it is not carefully peer-reviewed and vetted, making it difficult to sieve through information and understand it in order to allow informed decision making.

In this thesis, we conduct a critical evaluation of the scientific evidence and present the current landscape for COVID-19 therapeutics. We first discuss efforts to repurpose old drugs and to discover novel drugs against COVID-19. We then evaluate the clinical evidence of the most promising drug candidates that are approved or recommended for emergency use by relying on high quality systematic reviews as guided by the AMSTAR-2 tool and/or latest clinical evidence if no systematic reviews are available. Lastly, we discuss pressing challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and provide conclusions and recommendations for future work.