IMR Press / FBL / Volume 27 / Issue 4 / DOI: 10.31083/j.fbl2704113
Open Access Original Research
Potential SARS-CoV-2 nonstructural proteins inhibitors: drugs repurposing with drug-target networks and deep learning
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1 REHS Program, San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California, San Diego, CA 92093-0505, USA
2 San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California, San Diego, CA 92093-0505, USA
3 Department of Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego, CA 92093-0505, USA
4 Biomedical Information Analysis, La Jolla, CA 92038-2525, USA
*Correspondence: itsigeln@ucsd.edu (Igor F. Tsigelny)
Academic Editor: Sang Heui Seo
Front. Biosci. (Landmark Ed) 2022, 27(4), 113; https://doi.org/10.31083/j.fbl2704113
Submitted: 28 December 2021 | Revised: 14 January 2022 | Accepted: 14 January 2022 | Published: 1 April 2022
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Vaccine and anti-viral drug development for SARS-CoV2)
Copyright: © 2022 The Author(s). Published by IMR Press.
This is an open access article under the CC BY 4.0 license.
Abstract

Background: In the current COVID-19 pandemic, with an absence of approved drugs and widely accessible vaccines, repurposing existing drugs is vital to quickly developing a treatment for the disease. Methods: In this study, we used a dataset consisting of sequences of viral proteins and chemical structures of pharmaceutical drugs for known drug–target interactions (DTIs) and artificially generated non-interacting DTIs to train a binary classifier with the ability to predict new DTIs. Random Forest (RF), deep neural network (DNN), and convolutional neural networks (CNN) were tested. The CNN and RF models were selected for the classification task. Results: The models generalized well to the given DTI data and were used to predict DTIs involving SARS-CoV-2 nonstructural proteins (NSPs). We elucidated (with the CNN) 29 drugs involved in 82 DTIs with a 97% probability of interaction, 44 DTIs of which had a 99% probability of interaction, to treat COVID-19. The RF elucidated 6 drugs involved in 17 DTIs with a 90% probability of interacting. Conclusions: These results give new insight into possible inhibitors of the viral proteins beyond pharmacophore models and molecular docking procedures used in recent studies.

Keywords
SARS-CoV-2
COVID-19
drug-target interactions
machine learning
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