Table 1.

Comparison of biological and pharmacological characteristics of chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir and convalescent plasma therapy for treatment of SARS-CoV-2 patients.

Pharmacological Characteristics	Chloroquine and Hydroxychloroquine	Convalescent Plasma Therapy	Remdesivir
Origin	Cinchona bark derived	Human derived	Synthetic
Drug Delivery Route	Oral (Pastick et al., 2020)	Intravenous transfusion	Intravenous infusion
Metabolism	Chloroquine: metabolized in the liver into N-desethylchloroquine. (Projean et al., 2003). Hydroxychloroquine: metabolized in the liver into desethyl chloroquine (Lim et al., 2009).	N/A because this is not a drug	Intracellularly metabolized into an analog of adenosine triphosphate (Jorgensen et al., 2020)
Half-life	Chloroquine: 20–60 days Hydroxychloroquine: 22.4 days (Pastick et al., 2020)	IgG: 21 days IgM: 10 days (Rosado et al., 2020)	Nucleotide triphosphate metabolite: 20 h
EC50 Value	Chloroquine: 23.90 μM Hydroxychloroquine: 6.14 μM (Sanders et al., 2020)	N/A because this is not a drug	0.77 μM (Sanders et al., 2020)
Absorption	Chloroquine: Rapid absorption (89%) by gastrointestinal tract hydroxychloroquine: Rapid absorption 74% by gastrointestinal tract. (Browning, 2014, Pastick et al., 2020).	N/A because this product is administered intravenously	N/A because this drug is administered intravenously
Pathway for excretion	Chloroquine: 50–60% excreted in urine, 10–20% as metabolite. Hydroxychloroquine: 50–60% excreted in the urine, 8–10% for chloroquine and 15–24% for hydroxychloroquine eliminated through the feces. 5% is sloughed off in skin, 2% excretion in breast milk (Browning, 2014, McCarthy and Price, 2015)	Proteins in plasma are thought to be broken down in the liver and recycled for use in other proteins and tissue (Kelley and Roberts, 1956)	Renal and hepatic. Low renal excretion, 49%excreted in urine GS‐as 441,524 in urine And small percentage in excreted in feces (Singh et al., 2020, Jorgensen et al., 2020)
Mechanism of action	Increases endosomal pH and interferes with glycosylation of SARS-CoV-2 cell surface receptors to prevent virus binding to target cells (Pastick et al., 2020). Reduces mitogen-activated protein kinase activation, inhibiting virus replication, virion assembly, and budding (Devaux et al., 2020).	Provides immediate short-term immunization through antibodies contained in plasma that leads to viral neutralization. Suppression of viremia and other mechanisms like antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity (ADCC) may also play a role.	Metabolizes in active form. Interferes with action of RdRp, which is required for viral replication. Remdesivir acts as a disrupting nucleotide analog to stop replicative activity of RdRp. (Eastman et al., 2020)