Evidence supporting Camostat as repurposing drug against COVID-19 using CoV-DrugX Pipeline
Yogalakshmi Sabapathy, Robin Sinha, Trapti Sharma, P Preeti, Kamal Rawal · 2022
Background: The upsurge of the SARS-CoV-2 infection continues even after two years of its inception due to inadequate and unequal distribution of approved vaccines. There are only ten approved vaccines as per the WHO report as of Jan 2022. Hence, there is a large demand for antivirals designed to combat SARS-CoV-2. However, the development and approval of a new drug will take nearly 10 to 15years. Thus, repurposing of existing drugs developed against other diseases is considered the appropriate action to meet the global demand.Methods: The computational approach based drug repurposing is an emerging field and it screens large numbers of drugs within a short span of time utilizing knowledge and omics data available in pharmaceutical research. The CoV-DrugX Pipeline server is a computational tool for repositioning existing drugs for COVID-19 treatment. Results and conclusions: The camostat drug was found to be effective against COVID-19 based on CoV-DrugX analysis and the CoV-DrugX Pipeline could be a productive computational tool for drug repositioning in terms of usage and function.