Drug Repurposing Screen for Compounds Inhibiting the Cytopathic Effect of SARS-CoV-2

Drug repurposing is a rapid approach to identify therapeutics for the treatment of emerging infectious diseases such as COVID-19 To address the urgent need for treatment options, we carried out a quantitative high-throughput screen using a SARS-CoV-2 cytopathic assay with a compound collection of 8,810 approved and investigational drugs, mechanism-based bioactive compounds, and natural products Three hundred and nineteen compounds with anti-SARS-CoV-2 activities were identified and confirmed, including 91 approved drugs and 49 investigational drugs The anti-SARS-CoV-2 activities of 230 of these confirmed compounds, of which 38 are approved drugs, have not been previously reported Chlorprothixene, methotrimeprazine, and piperacetazine were the three most potent FDA-approved drugs with anti-SARS-CoV-2 activities These three compounds have not been previously reported to have anti-SARS-CoV-2 activities, although their antiviral activities against SARS-CoV and Ebola virus have been reported These results demonstrate that this comprehensive data set is a useful resource for drug repurposing efforts, including design of new drug combinations for clinical trials for SARS-CoV-2 © Copyright © 2021 Chen, Shinn, Itkin, Eastman, Bostwick, Rasumussen, Huang, Shen, Hu, Wilson, Brooks, Guo, Zhao, Klump-Thomas, Simeonov, Michael, Lo, Hall and Zheng