A review of COVID-19 biomarkers and drug targets: resources and tools

Abstract

The stratification of patients at risk of progression of COVID-19 and their molecular characterization is of extreme importance to optimize treatment and to identify therapeutic options. The bioinformatics community has responded to the outbreak emergency with a set of tools and resource to identify biomarkers and drug targets that we review here. Starting from a consolidated corpus of 27 570 papers, we adopt latent Dirichlet analysis to extract relevant topics and select those associated with computational methods for biomarker identification and drug repurposing. The selected topics span from machine learning and artificial intelligence for disease characterization to vaccine development and to therapeutic target identification. Although the way to go for the ultimate defeat of the pandemic is still long, the amount of knowledge, data and tools generated so far constitutes an unprecedented example of global cooperation to this threat.

Robotics and artificial intelligence in healthcare during COVID-19 pandemic: A systematic review

“…AI-driven technologies have been brought forth in the formulation of potential drug development for COVID-19 treatment [151] , [152] , [153] . In [154] , the authors reviewed the literature about ML and AI technologies for biomarker discovery, disease characterisation and potential target drug identification in COVID-19. DeepMind [155] has predicted the protein structure of the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for causing COVID-19 using deep learning methods.…”

COVID-19 pandemic and artificial intelligence possibilities: A healthcare perspective

“…An ML system to analyze images of patients' white blood cells for signs of an activated immune response against sepsis may be useful. 10 …”

Main Chemotypes of SARS-CoV-2 Reproduction Inhibitors

“…The problem stimulates innovations and drives, in part, the development of both medicinal chemistry and modern organic synthesis. The urgency of the problem has prompted chemical community to perform in silico analysis the affi nity of compounds in the existing libraries for the known SARS-CoV2 targets [2][3][4][5][6][7] and urgently consider the possibility of repurposing existing drugs [3,4,[8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. In view of the sharply increased global demand, there is an urgent need for the development and scaling of new methods of synthesis, as well as costeffective technological solutions for the production of antiviral pharmaceutical substances [18][19][20].…”

“…10), pyrimidines 105-110 [90,[102][103][104][105], benzopyrimidines 111-113 [93,106,107], imidazolopyrimidines 114 [96] and 115 [109], pyrazolopyrimidine 116 [96], pyrazine 117 [110], benzopyrazines 118 [90] and 119 [85], benzothiazine 120 [111] (Fig. 11), and saturated heterocyclic compounds 121-127 [21,57,6,85,90,99] (Fig. 12).…”