CoviRx: A User-Friendly Interface for Systematic Down-Selection of Repurposed Drug Candidates for COVID-19

• DOI: 10.20944/preprints202209.0323.v1
• Publication Date: 2022-09-22T07:54:01Z
• Authors: Hardik Ashish Jain; Vinti Agarwal; Chaarvi Bansal; Anupama Kumar; Faheem Faheem; Muzaffar-Ur-Rehma...; Sankaranarayanan ...; Moana M Simpson; Avinash V Karpe; Rohitash Chandra; Christopher A Mac...; Ian K Styles; Amanda L Peterson; Matthew A Cooper; Carl M.J. Kirkpat...; Rohan M Shah; Enzo A Palombo; Natalie L Trevaskis; Darren J Creek; Seshadri S Vasan
• Keywords: 0301 basic medicine; 03 medical and health sciences; drug repurposing; drug fingerprints; web application development; COVID-19; information_technology_data_management; search engine; open-source dataset; Bibliography. Library science. Information resources; Z; 3. Good health

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 quickly get safe, effective, and affordable COVID-19 treatment is to repurpose drugs that are already approved for other diseases as adjuvants along with the ongoing vaccine regime. The process of developing an accurate and standardized drug repurposing dataset requires a considerable level of resources and expertise due to the commercial availability of an extensive array of drugs that could be potentially used to address the SARS-CoV-2 infection. To address this bottleneck, we created the CoviRx platform. CoviRx is a user-friendly interface that provides access to the data, which is manually curated for COVID-19 drug repurposing data. Through CoviRx, the data curated has been made open-source to help advance drug repurposing research. CoviRx also encourages users to submit their findings after thoroughly validating the data, followed by merging it by enforcing uniformity and integ-rity-preserving constraints. This article discusses the various features of CoviRx and its design principles. CoviRx has been designed so that its functionality is independent of the data it dis-plays. Thus, in the future, this platform can be extended to include any other disease X beyond COVID-19. CoviRx can be accessed at www.covirx.org.