Indian Origin Scientist And His Team Uses AI To Identify New Drugs To Treat COVID-19

An Indian scientist and his team used Artificial Intelligence to recognise hundreds of new potential drugs that could be used to treat the novel coronavirus disease.

Anandasankar Ray, a professor at the University of California, Riverside in the US asserted that “There is an urgent need to identify effective drugs that treat or prevent COVID-19. He further added that, “We have developed a drug discovery pipeline that identified several candidates."

This study is published in the journal Heliyon, in the paper titled, “Predicting novel drugs for SARS-CoV-2 using machine learning from a greater than 10 million chemical space.”

Anandasankar Ray said that “As a result, drug candidate pipelines, such as the one we developed, are extremely important to pursue as a first step toward the systematic discovery of new drugs for treating COVID-19."

He further added that,“Existing FDA-approved drugs that target one or more human proteins important for viral entry and replication are currently high priority for repurposing as new COVID-19 drugs. The demand is high for additional drugs or small molecules that can interfere with both entry and replication of SARS-CoV-2 in the body. We have developed a drug discovery pipeline that identified several candidates.”

A graduate student in Ray 's laboratory, Joel Kowalewski used small numbers of previously identified ligands for 65 human proteins known to interact with SARS-CoV-2 proteins, including the ACE2 receptor.

Kowalewski said that “The 65 protein targets are quite diverse and also involved in many other diseases, including cancers,”  “Besides the ongoing attempts to repurpose drugs against these targets, we were also interested in discovering new chemicals which are not currently well studied.”

Ray and Kowalewski said that "Our database will serve as a resource to quickly identify and evaluate safe treatment strategies for the novel coronavirus and other diseases where the same 65 target proteins are relevant. The COVID-19 pandemic inspired us, we expect our predictions from more than 10 million will speed up the discovery of drug in the battle against not only coronavirus but also a variety of other diseases."

(Inputs from genengnews website)