An in vitro assessment of anti-SARS-CoV-2 activity of oral preparations of iodine complexes (RENESSANS)

  1. Imran Altaf
  2. Muhammad Faisal Nadeem
  3. Nadir Hussain
  4. Muhammad Nawaz
  5. Sohail Raza
  6. Muhammad Asad Ali
  7. Sohail Hasan
  8. Nazish Matti
  9. Muhammad Ashraf
  10. Ihsan Ulla
  11. Sehar Fazal
  12. Saira Rafique
  13. Muhammad Adnan
  14. Nageen Sardar
  15. Tahir Khan
  16. Muhammad Moavia
  17. Sohaib Ashraf
  18. Zarfishan Tahir
  19. Nadia Mukhtar
  20. Tahir Yaqub

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Abstract

Since the emergence of CoVID-19 pandemic in China in late 2019, scientists are striving hard to explore non-toxic, viable anti-SARS-CoV-2 compounds or medicines. We determined In Vitro anti-SARS-CoV-2 activity of oral formulations (syrup and capsule) of an Iodine-complex (Renessans). A monolayer of vero cells were exposed to SARS-CoV-2 in the presence and absence of different concentrations (equivalent to 50, 05 and 0.5 μg/ml of I 2 ) of Renessans. Anti-SARS-CoV-2 activity of each of the formulation was assessed in the form of cell survival, SARS-CoV-2-specific cytopathic effect (CPE) and genome quantization. With varying concentrations of syrup and capsule, a varying rate of inhibition of CPE, cells survival and virus replication was observed. Compared to 0.5 μg/ml concentration of Renessans syrup, 5 and 50 μg/ml showed comparable results where there was a 100% cell survival, no CPEs and a negligible viral replication (ΔCT= 0.11 and 0.13, respectively). This study indicates that Renessans, containing iodine, may have potential activity against SARS-CoV-2 which needs to be further investigated in human clinical trials.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.06.29.171173: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Limitation of the study is that we only used CT values for estimation of virus titers; further experiments are needed where TCID50 should be determined as well and we are working on that. This study indicates that RENESSANS (iodine containing oral formulation), may have potential activity against SARS-CoV-2 which needs to be further investigated in human clinical trials.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No funding statement was detected.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.06.29.171173v1 on bioRxiv