Repurposing Drugs and Synergistic Combinations as Potential Therapies for Inhibiting SARS-CoV-2 and Coronavirus Replication.

Drug repurposing can serve an important role in rapidly discovering medicament options for emerging microbial pandemics. In this study, a pragmatic approach is demonstrated for screening and testing drug combinations as potential broad-spectrum therapies against SARS-CoV-2 and other betacoronaviruses. Rapid cell-based phenotypic small molecule screens were executed using related common-cold-causing HCoV-OC43 betacoronavirus to identify replication inhibitors from a library of drugs approved by regulatory agencies for other indications.