ABSTRACT
In the wake of recent COVID-19 pandemics scientists around the world rushed to deliver numerous CADD (Computer-Aided Drug Discovery) methods and tools that could be reliably used to discover novel drug candidates against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. With that, there emerged a trend of a significant democratization of CADD that contributed to the rapid development of various COVID-19 drug candidates currently undergoing different stages of validation. On the other hand, this democratization also inadvertently led to the surge rapidly performed molecular docking studies to nominate multiple scores of novel drug candidates supported by computational arguments only. Albeit driven by best intentions, most of such studies also did not follow best practices in the field that require experience and expertise learned through multiple rigorously designed benchmarking studies and rigorous experimental validation. In this Viewpoint we reflect on recent disbalance between small number of rigorous and comprehensive studies and the proliferation of purely computational studies enabled by the ease of docking software availability. We further elaborate on the hyped oversale of CADD methods' ability to rapidly yield viable drug candidates and reiterate the critical importance of rigor and adherence to the best practices of CADD in view of recent emergence of AI and Big Data in the field.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Drug Design , Humans , Molecular Docking Simulation , Computer-Aided Design , SARS-CoV-2ABSTRACT
Strategies for drug discovery and repositioning are urgently need with respect to COVID-19. Here we present REDIAL-2020, a suite of computational models for estimating small molecule activities in a range of SARS-CoV-2-related assays. Models were trained using publicly available, high-throughput screening data and by employing different descriptor types and various machine learning strategies. Here we describe the development and use of eleven models that span across the areas of viral entry, viral replication, live virus infectivity, in vitro infectivity and human cell toxicity. REDIAL-2020 is available as a web application through the DrugCentral web portal (http://drugcentral.org/Redial). The web application also provides similarity search results that display the most similar molecules to the query, as well as associated experimental data. REDIAL-2020 can serve as a rapid online tool for identifying active molecules for COVID-19 treatment. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.