ABSTRACT
Although various vaccines are now commercially available, they have not been able to stop the spread of COVID-19 infection completely. An excellent strategy to get safe, effective, and affordable COVID-19 treatments quickly is to repurpose drugs that are already approved for other diseases. The process of developing an accurate and standardized drug repurposing dataset requires considerable resources and expertise due to numerous commercially available drugs that could be potentially used to address the SARS-CoV-2 infection. To address this bottleneck, we created the CoviRx.org platform. CoviRx is a user-friendly interface that allows analysis and filtering of large quantities of data, which is onerous to curate manually for COVID-19 drug repurposing. Through CoviRx, the curated data have been made open source to help combat the ongoing pandemic and encourage users to submit their findings on the drugs they have evaluated, in a uniform format that can be validated and checked for integrity by authenticated volunteers. This article discusses the various features of CoviRx, its design principles, and how its functionality is independent of the data it displays. Thus, in the future, this platform can be extended to include any other disease beyond COVID-19.
ABSTRACT
SARS-CoV-2 is the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic which has claimed more than 6.5 million lives worldwide, devastating the economy and overwhelming healthcare systems globally. The development of new drug molecules and vaccines has played a critical role in managing the pandemic; however, new variants of concern still pose a significant threat as the current vaccines cannot prevent all infections. This situation calls for the collaboration of biomedical scientists and healthcare workers across the world. Repurposing approved drugs is an effective way of fast-tracking new treatments for recently emerged diseases. To this end, we have assembled and curated a database consisting of 7817 compounds from the Compounds Australia Open Drug collection. We developed a set of eight filters based on indicators of efficacy and safety that were applied sequentially to down-select drugs that showed promise for drug repurposing efforts against SARS-CoV-2. Considerable effort was made to evaluate approximately 14,000 assay data points for SARS-CoV-2 FDA/TGA-approved drugs and provide an average activity score for 3539 compounds. The filtering process identified 12 FDA-approved molecules with established safety profiles that have plausible mechanisms for treating COVID-19 disease. The methodology developed in our study provides a template for prioritising drug candidates that can be repurposed for the safe, efficacious, and cost-effective treatment of COVID-19, long COVID, or any other future disease. We present our database in an easy-to-use interactive interface (CoviRx that was also developed to enable the scientific community to access to the data of over 7000 potential drugs and to implement alternative prioritisation and down-selection strategies.