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arXiv · 2005.10028

Repositioning of 8565 existing drugs for COVID-19

Kaifu Gao·Duc Duy Nguyen·Jiahui Chen·Rui Wang·Guo-Wei Wei
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Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has infected near 5 million people and led to over 0.3 million deaths. Currently, there is no specific anti-SARS-CoV-2 medication. New drug discovery typically takes more than ten years. Drug repositioning becomes one of the most feasible approaches for combating COVID-19. This work curates the largest available experimental dataset for SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-CoV main protease inhibitors. Based on this dataset, we develop validated machine learning models with relatively low root mean square error to screen 1553 FDA-approved drugs as well as other 7012 investigational or off-market drugs in DrugBank. We found that many existing drugs might be potentially potent to SARS-CoV-2. The druggability of many potent SARS-CoV-2 main protease inhibitors is analyzed. This work offers a foundation for further experimental studies of COVID-19 drug repositioning.

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Kaifu Gao, Duc Duy Nguyen, Jiahui Chen, Rui Wang, Guo-Wei Wei. 2020-05-20. Repositioning of 8565 existing drugs for COVID-19. https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.10028

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