Antibiotics
Few clinical trials are recruiting patients with COVID-19 to test the efficacy of the known macrolide antibiotic azithromycin alone (NCT04332107, NCT04381962, NCT04369365, NCT04371107) or in combination with hydroxychloroquine (NCT04339816, and NCT04336332). The lipophilic antibiotics tetracyclines have also been proposed as treatment for COVID-19 (Sodhi & Etminan, 2020), with just one clinical study (NCT04371952) that is recruiting COVID-19 patients to test the efficacy and safety of the tetracycline doxycycline.
The beneficial effects of azithromycin against lipopolysaccharides (LPS)-induced pulmonary neutrophilia have been documented to involve NLRP3 inflammasome inhibition (Bosnar et al., 2011; Gualdoni, Lingscheid, Schmetterer, Hennig, Steinberger & Zlabinger, 2015), which is also involved in mediating tetracycline beneficial effects in experimental models of diabetic retinopathy and ischemic stroke (Chen et al., 2017; Lu, Xiao & Luo, 2016).