Heterogeneous network-based drug repurposing for COVID-19
This work addresses the urgent need for drug repurposing to treat COVID-19, though it appears incremental as it applies an existing method to new data.
The authors tackled the problem of identifying potential drugs for COVID-19 by constructing a heterogeneous network based on coronavirus-related proteins and using a deep learning method, achieving high performance in predicting effective drugs.
The Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) belongs to human coronaviruses (HCoVs), which spreads rapidly around the world. Compared with new drug development, drug repurposing may be the best shortcut for treating COVID-19. Therefore, we constructed a comprehensive heterogeneous network based on the HCoVs-related target proteins and use the previously proposed deepDTnet, to discover potential drug candidates for COVID-19. We obtain high performance in predicting the possible drugs effective for COVID-19 related proteins. In summary, this work utilizes a powerful heterogeneous network-based deep learning method, which may be beneficial to quickly identify candidate repurposable drugs toward future clinical trials for COVID-19. The code and data are available at https://github.com/stjin-XMU/HnDR-COVID.