Use of traditional Chinese and modern medicines in the treatment of Covid-19: a minireview

COVID-19 pandemic has affected human life worldwide since the first discovery of human SARS-CoV-2 infection. Due to scarce understandings of this novel coronavirus, therapeutic interventions regardless of modern or traditional medicines are implemented according to previous knowledge on other virus outbreaks. Besides antiviral drugs, traditional Chinese medicine has concomitantly shown to alleviate clinical symptoms associated with this disease. Recently, emerging studies also indicate that integrating modern medicine and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) could bring more significant benefits to COVID-19 patients. This minireview provides a summary on the earliest therapeutic approaches recommended by World Health Organization and approved by China FDA for COVID-19 treatment since the outbreak, which are based on the outcomes obtained from preclinical or clinical trials performed until December 2020. The underlying molecular actions of these medicines on COVID-19 that have progressively revealed are also deliberated here. However, the mechanistic actions of these medicines still required intensive research and clinical investigations as some mechanisms are in silico predicted. Due to the treatment urgency, the main limitation of these studies is small group of patients in the trials. Nevertheless, they serve as an important stepping stone for further therapeutic intervention