Exploring the possible use of saponins in the treatments of COVID-19

Bouchachoua, Leyla; Mameri, Fatima; Bekhouche, Khadidja; Djakoun, Abedalhamid

Journal of Molecular and Pharmaceutical Sciences
Volume 2, Numéro 2, Pages 10-28
2024-07-25

Exploring The Possible Use Of Saponins In The Treatments Of Covid-19

Authors : Bouchachoua Leyla . Mameri Fatima . Bekhouche Khadidja . Djakoun Abedalhamid .

Abstract

A new coronavirus called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV-2) appeared in Wuhan (China) on 2019 and became a pandemic owing to its rapid emergence. Until now, there is no effective treatment to fight against this disease. The plants continuously gave effective phytoconstituents with low toxicity. Saponins are a class of plants secondary metabolites that have shown good efficacy in several studies against several viruses. Some of them was attracted attention of Scientifics in the treatment of COVID-19. The purpose of our review is to examinate the use of saponins during the pandemic in the treatment of SARS-CoV-2, notably the antiviral activity. The literature search was executed using PubMed database to search for suitable keywords such as COVID-19, saponins for articles published till 20 August 2021. The present systematic review was performed based on PRISMA protocol. Data extraction and quality evaluation of articles were performed by three reviewers. 41 articles were the results of the search and based on the inclusions and exclusions criteria, 15 articles were included in this systematic review. Firstly, we focused on the in vitro and vivo studies. Glycyrrhizin, Escin, Esculentoside A and Saikosaponins have already been shown to be effective against certain coronaviruses. Platycodin D, Ginsenoside Rg6 and Oleanolic acid derivatives tested against SARS-CoV-2 and showed a good activity. In the second part of this systematic review, we anticipated in summarizing on the in-silico studies, especialy the computational molecular docking simulations of saponins against differents sets of SARS-CoV-2 binding protein. In-silico study revealed that, Saikosaponin-U, Saikosaponin-V, glycyrrhizin and Esculentoside A have good Molecular docking simulations.