Current Perspectives on Biological Therapy for COPD.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a chronic, complex, and heterogeneous condition with significant mortality, morbidity, and socioeconomic burden. Given the heterogeneity, the current management of COPD, which mainly relies on bronchodilators and corticosteroids, cannot consider all COPD populations. Moreover, the present treatment modalities are directed at minimizing symptoms and reducing the risk of a future attack, but they exhibit few meaningful anti-inflammatory activities in preventing and reducing disease progression. Therefore, new anti-inflammatory molecules are needed to manage COPD better. Use of targeted biotherapy may obtain better results by increasing understanding of the underlying inflammatory process and identifying new biomarkers. In this review, we focus briefly on study of the underlying inflammatory process in the pathogenesis of COPD for better identification of novel target biomarkers, and we describe a novel class of anti-inflammatory biologics that are already under evaluation for their use in managing COPD.

Antiviral treatment in COVID-19: which is the most promising?-a narrative review.

The whole world is battling through coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) which is a fatal pandemic. In the early 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it as a global health emergency without definitive treatments and preventive approaches. In the absence of definitive therapeutic agents, this thorough review summarizes and outlines the potency and safety of all molecules and therapeutics which may have potential antiviral effects. A number of molecules and therapeutics licensed or being tested for some other conditions were found effective in different in vitro studies as well as in many small sample-sized clinical trials and independent case studies. However, in those clinical trials, there were some limitations which need to be overcome to find the most promising antiviral against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). In conclusion, many of above-mentioned antivirals seems to have some therapeutic effects but none of them have been shown to have a strong evidence for their proper recommendation and approval in the treatment of COVID-19. Constantly evolving new evidences, exclusive adult data, language barrier, and type of study (observational, retrospective, small-sized clinical trials, or independent case series) resulted to the several limitations of this review. The need for multicentered, large sample-sized, randomized, placebo-controlled trials on COVID-19 patients to reach a proper conclusion on the most promising antiviral agent is warranted.