The novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is an emerging pathogen that was first described in late December 2019 and causes a severe respiratory infection in humans. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, international attention has raised to develop treatment and control options such as types of immunotherapies. The immunotherapy is an effective method for fighting against similar viral infections such as SARS-CoV, and MERS-CoV. These methods include several types of vaccines, monoclonal antibody candidates, and etc. This systematic review article was designed to evaluate the existing evidence and experience related to immunotherapy for 2019-nCoV. Web of Science (ISI), PubMed, and Scopus databases were used to search for suitable keywords such as 2019-nCoV, novel coronavirus, Immunotherapy, interleukin, vaccine and the related words for relevant publications up to 24.3.2020. The present systematic review was performed based on PRISMA protocol. Data extraction and quality valuation of articles were performed by two reviewers. 51 articles were the results of the search and based on the inclusions and exclusions criteria, 7 articles were included in the final review. As a conclusion of these studies demonstrated that although no serious research has been done on this subject at the time of writing this article, similar studies on the related viruses showed notable results. So immunotherapy for this virus can also be a suitable option.

Background

۲۰۱۹-nCoV a large enveloped virus with a positive sense, singlestranded RNA genome, is the third known coronavirus after SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV that was first identified in late December 2019 and causes severe respiratory illness and pneumonia-like infection in humans [1,2]. WHO has declared the pandemic outbreak of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) as a global health emergency. Immunotherapy is an efficient therapeutic option intervention against viral infections. Most immunotherapy attempts have been successful to fight against similar COVID-19 viruses such as SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV. The main methods in this regard include several vaccines and monoclonal antibody candidates. Furthermore, according to existing evidence in fighting against viral infections such as Ebola, influenza, SARS, and MERS plasma exchange can likely reduce the viral load and disease mortality [3,4]. In both SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 viruses entry into the host cells is mediated by interaction of the receptor-binding domain (RBD) in S protein on virus outer-membrane and angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) on cell. So, these proteins can be the major potential targets for immunotherapy [1,5]. The increasing knowledge of MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV immunotherapies in recent years might increase the opportunities to design effective same therapeutics for novel coronavirus [3].