PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Nan Wang
AU  - Shengli Han
AU  - Rui Liu
AU  - Liesu Meng
AU  - Huaizhen He
AU  - Yongjing Zhang
AU  - Cheng Wang
AU  - Yanni Lv
AU  - Jue Wang
AU  - Xiaowei Li
AU  - Yuanyuan Ding
AU  - Jia Fu
AU  - Yajing Hou
AU  - Wen Lu
AU  - Weina Ma
AU  - Yingzhuan Zhan
AU  - Bingling Dai
AU  - Jie Zhang
AU  - Xiaoyan Pan
AU  - Shiling Hu
AU  - Jiapan Gao
AU  - Qianqian Jia
AU  - Liyang Zhang
AU  - Shuai Ge
AU  - Saisai Wang
AU  - Peida Liang
AU  - Tian Hu
AU  - Jiayu Lu
AU  - Xiangjun Wang
AU  - Huaxin Zhou
AU  - Wenjing Ta
AU  - Yuejin Wang
AU  - Shemin Lu
AU  - Langchong He
TI  - Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as ACE2 blockers to inhibit viropexis of COVID-19 Spike pseudotype virus
AID  - 10.1101/2020.06.22.164665
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.06.22.164665
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/06/22/2020.06.22.164665.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/06/22/2020.06.22.164665.full
AB  - The pandemic coronavirus COVID-19 affected global health from the end of 2019 to 2020 and may challenge global health in the future. There have been reports of Chloroquine (CQ) and Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) used in clinical treatment. In our study, we used CCK-8 stain, flow cytometry and immunofluorescent stain to evaluated the toxicity and autophagy of CQ and HCQ respectively on ACE2 high expressed HEK293T cells (ACE2hi cells). We further analysied the binding character of CQ and HCQ to ACE2 by molecular docking, surface plasmon resonance (SPR) assays and molecule docking, COVID-19 spike pseudotype virus was also taken to investigate the suppression viropexis effect of CQ and HCQ. Results showed that HCQ is slightly more toxic to ACE2hi cells than CQ, both CQ and HCQ could bind to ACE2, and they also exhibit equivalent suppression effect for the entrance of COVID-19 Spike pseudotype virus into ACE2hi cells. Our finding provides a theoretical and experimental basis for the clinical treatment of CQ and HCQ for COVID-19.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.