Chapter3 : Fighting COVID-19 with Artificial Intelligence

reading notes of《Artificial Intelligence in Drug Design》

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1.Introduction

• Drug repurposing, also referred to as therapeutic switching, drug redirecting, repositioning, reprofiling, or re-tasking, is a strategy that focuses on the identification of novel uses and/or indications for established drug substances.

• This strategy offers serval advantages when compared to developing new molecular entities (NMs):

  • these drug have already passed toxicity tests
  • reduce time frame
  • lower cost of drug development

• Historically, the strategy of repurposing has been led more by chance than actual rational design, such as sildenafil and thalidomide.
• Drug repurposing is well suited for AI applications with respect to capturing informative features from noisy, incomplete, and high-dimensional data.
• The accelerated global spread of SARS-CoV-2 lead to an immense urgency for identification of new therapies. Drug repur- posing was considered a promising approach for two main reasons:
  • the similarity of SARS-CoV-2 with other coronaviruses and the relatively straightforward way of sample acquisition and study.
  • chemical and genomic data together with pharmacological and phenotypic information are rapidly accumulating and they are, for the most part, accessible and standardized.