COVID-19 pandemic: outbreak, potential vaccines and medications

The outbreak of the current global pandemic caused by the spread of a novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has posed an unprecedented threat to global health and economy across the whole world. As of today, the number of cases diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2 is exceeding 271 million with over 5.32 million deaths globally. Despite the high throughput technology and considerable advances in sciences, the outbreaks of the COVID-19 pandemic present a colossal challenge to scientific community. Scientists and clinicians all over the world are putting tremendous efforts to develop effective treatments to combat this deadly pathogen, at least to contain it momentarily until an adequate treatment regimen is available. Conventionally, vaccines have been developed as one of the therapeutic strategies to restrict infectious diseases. Although several vaccines are in the pipeline, evaluation of efficacy in animals' studies and human are time-consuming. On the other hand, several drugs already in clinical use are being employed to test their efficacy against SARS-CoV-2. Some of these drugs have been already used as anti-viral drugs and others have been used for different therapeutic purposes. In this review, we summarize the ongoing efforts to control the dissemination of SARS-CoV-2 and highlight the potential prophylactic and therapeutic measures including the recently developed vaccines in the foreseeable future. Moreover, we emphasize an importance of having a customized strategy that can be easily and quickly employed to overcome possible future outbreaks.