COVID-19 outbreak: Challenges in pharmacotherapy based on pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic aspects of drug therapy in patients with moderate to severe infection

The new coronavirus (COVID-19) was first detected in Wuhan city of China in December 2019. Most patients infected with COVID-19 had clinical presentations of dry cough, fever, dyspnea, chest pain, fatigue and malaise, pneumonia, and bilateral infiltration in chest CT. Soon COVID-19 was spread around the world and became a pandemic. Now many patients around the world are suffering from this disease. Patients with predisposing diseases are highly prone to COVID-19 and manifesting severe infection especially with organ function damage such as acute respiratory distress syndrome, acute kidney injury, septic shock, ventilator-associated pneumonia, and death. Till now many drugs have been considered in the treatment of COVID-19 pneumonia, but pharmacotherapy in elderly patients and patients with pre-existing comorbidities is highly challenging. In this review, different potential drugs which have been considered in COVID-19 treatment have been discussed in detail. Also, challenges in the pharmacotherapy of COVID-19 pneumonia in patients with the underlying disease have been considered based on pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic aspects of these drugs.