AI-Driven Drug Repurposing for COVID-19: Revolutionizing Therapeutic Discovery and Treatment Strategies
Apurva Rustagi, Agrima Chopra, Shreya Aggarwal, Yashi Gautam, Bhavya Ramesh, Sumit Tanwar, Ayush Anand, Kamal Rawal · 2024
In March of 2020, a deadly disaster caused a global pandemic all across the globe. This paper elucidates the concept of drug repurposing, a strategy that harnesses existing drugs for new therapeutic purposes. Leveraging drugs already approved for other indications offers a promising avenue for rapid deployment against COVID-19, circumventing the lengthy and costly process of drug development from scratch. Central to the drug repurposing approach is the utilization of sophisticated computational tools one such development is in the form of CoV-DrugX DL-200 which helps integrate over 200 chemoinformatics properties to analyze drug structures and characteristics and whether or not the drug can be repurposed or not. By accepting input in the form of SMILE structure, canonical SMILE structure, drug name, or DrugBankID, the database employs advanced algorithms to predict the potential candidates. This data-driven approach enables researchers and clinicians to expedite the identification of candidate drugs for clinical trials, accelerating the search for effective therapeutics for the pandemic that was caused and for any other catastrophe that we might face.