Cov-DrugX pipeline: Potential tool for investigation of Minoxidil as repurposing drug for COVID-19
Solanki Jaykishan, Robin Sinha, Trapti Sharma, P Preeti, Kamal Rawal · 2022
Background: Sars Cov-2 infection causing severe infection to the respiratory tract with widespread and high mortality rate lead to a global pandemic. To fight against the virus infection, many pharmaceutical companies and research institutes have come up with mass vaccination to the population. But continuously mutating viruses with new variants remains a question of the significance of vaccines on new variants, so it is essential to find a quick and safe drug for corona-virus infection. Hence, drug repurposing is a powerful strategy to utilize the significance of existing drugs to meet the cure for a new disease. Minoxidil is an FDA-approved significant vasodilator drug. This paper investigates the possible use of Minoxidil for Sars Cov-2 infection. Methods: We implemented a Cov-DrugX pipeline that utilizes the power of Artificial intelligence and Machine learning to understand the drug mechanism and interaction with COVID-19 spike protein. There is an existing pipeline with the limitation of a single therapeutic strategic approach. On the other hand, Cov-DrugX pipeline collectively uses 14 different strategic modules to predict the possibility of a given drug involved in any disease curing pathways. Results: The docking result of a given drug suggests Minoxidil is promising for COVID-19 drug repurposing. Still, as we explore other modules in the pipeline, out of 14 modules, only 5 modules are found Minoxidil significant for repurposing drug. There is a lack of data that supports the direct involvement of Minoxidil in curing COVID-19 infection, so these results do not suggest the use of Minoxidil for COVID-19 repurposing drug. Cov-DrugX pipeline can investigate other drugs and play a key role in addressing the ongoing pandemic by producing accurate and promising results for repurposing of COVID-19, which speeds up the drug discovery process that provides a quick solution towards the new variant of COVID-19.