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).