Журнал инфекционных заболеваний и диагностики

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Emergence of New Drug Discovery Paradigm using Computational and Experimental Biology: Case Study of using Repurposing Drugs for COVID-19

Sreedhara Voleti1*, Shalini Saxena, Uday Saxena

Discovery of new drugs is an expensive and time-consuming process. Average time taken from bench to bedside (idea to drug launch) is about 12 years including clinical trials. The emergence of COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that there is a dire need to be able to launch therapeutics much sooner than the traditional timelines. As such the industry is reinventing the process to deliver drugs much faster.

As such we present here a new paradigm of identifying drugs for COVID-19. It uses three fundamental principles, viz., 1) using existing FDA approved drugs which have been approved for other diseases, so their safety is proven, 2) Using computational rational approaches for choosing the best drugs against the target of interest such as the Receptor Binding Domain of the Spike Protein of COVID-19, and, finally, 3) validation of these short-listed drugs through in vitro disease models. We estimate that such an approach could crash the timelines of bench to bedside to 5 years or less, thus fulfilling the needs of urgent unmet diseases such as COVID-19 faster.