Skip to content

COVID-19 PHARMACOME: Rational Selection of Drug Repurposing Candidates

Venn-1

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has challenged researchers at a global scale. The scientific community’s massive response has resulted in a flood of experiments, analyses, hypotheses, and publications, especially in the field drug repurposing. However, many of the proposed therapeutic compounds obtained from SARS-CoV-2 specific assays are not in agreement and thus demonstrate the need for a singular source of COVID-19 related information from which a rational selection of drug repurposing candidates can be made.

In this paper, we present the COVID-19 PHARMACOME, a comprehensive drug-target-mechanism graph generated from a compilation of several disease maps and experimental data focused on SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 pathophysiology. By applying a systematic approach, we were able to predict the effect of drug pairs on SARS-CoV-2 infection. Experimental validation of our results demonstrate that our graph can be used to not only explore the involved mechanistic pathways, but also to identify novel combinations of drug repurposing candidates.

To view the publication in full, please see Schultz, B., Zaliani, A., Ebeling, C. et al. A method for the rational selection of drug repurposing candidates from multimodal knowledge harmonization. Sci Rep 11, 11049 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-90296-2


 

During the pandemic, our understanding has been strengthened by those that built international collaborations quickly, across borders and disciplines. We acknowledge the role of Professor Martin Hofmann-Apitius in inviting PrecisionLife to participate and share some of energy and satisfaction of working together below.

“great collaboration between international partners from academia (Yale, Charité, University Hospital Frankfurt) and industry (PrecisionLife, PMI). One of the few “we can predict drug repurposing candidates” papers in the COVID-19 field that has invested substantially in a solid experimental validation; most papers on that topic report on modeling and prediction, but do not show a single screening experiment. In so far, I am more than happy that we had Fraunhofer ITMP in Hamburg on board; the specialists for screening and assays.”
 
Martin Hofmann-Apitius Head of the Department of Bioinformatics at Fraunhofer SCAI & Professor at the University of Bonn [LinkedIN] via Linkedin 26 May 2021.

Collaborating Organisations

PrecisionLife had the opportunity to share our stratification analysis of Severe Covid-19 Patients with the group.

Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing SCAI,

Bruce Schultz, Christian Ebeling, Vanessa Lage-Rupprecht, Reagon Karki, Yojana Gadiya, Daniel Domingo-Fernández, Manuel Lentzen, Tamara Raschka, Lauren Nicole DeLong, Alpha Tom Kodamullil, Holger Fröhlich, Marc Jacobs & Martin Hofmann-Apitius

Visit Website

ScreeningPort, Fraunhofer Institute for Translational Medicine and Pharmacology ITMP,

Andrea Zaliani, Jeanette Reinshagen, Phil Gribbon & Carsten Claussen in Hamburg and
Gerd Geisslinger & Sandra Ciesek in Frankfurt am Mian

Visit Website

Fraunhofer Cluster of Excellence for Immune Mediated Diseases, CIMD,

Andrea Zaliani, Jeanette Reinshagen, Phil Gribbon, Gerd Geisslinger & Carsten Claussen

Visit Website

Philipp Morris International R&D

Manuel Peitsch & Julia Hoeng

Visit Website

Causality BioModels Pvt Ltd.,

Shounak Baksi

Visit Website

Center for Digital Health, Berlin Institute of Health (BIH), Charité

Sören Lukassen & Roland Eils

Visit Website

Center for Biomedical Data Science, Yale School of Medicine,

Neal G. Ravindra & David van Dijk

Visit Website

Pharmazentrum Frankfurt/ZAFES, Institut Für Klinische Pharmakologie, Klinikum Der Goethe-Universität 

Gerd Geisslinger

Visit Website

Institute for Medical Virology, University Hospital

Denisa Bojkova, Jindrich Cinatl & Sandra Ciesek

Visit Website

DZIF, German Centre for Infection Research,

Sandra Ciesek

Visit Website

 

Sign Up

Subscribe to our newsletter