Research used AI platform to identify possible drugs for COVID-19 reuse (picture)
Washington:
Melatonin, a hormone that regulates the sleep-wake cycle and is commonly used as an over-the-counter sleeping pill, could be a viable treatment option for COVID-19, study finds.
The research, published in the journal PLOS Biology, used a new artificial intelligence (AI) platform to identify possible drugs for the reuse of COVID-19.
Analysis of patient data from the US-based Cleveland Clinic’s COVID-19 registry also found that melatonin use was associated with an almost 30% reduced likelihood of testing positive for SARS. -CoV-2.
The researchers adjusted their results based on age, race, smoking history, and various disease comorbidities.
However, the reduced likelihood of testing positive for the virus fell from 30 to 52 percent for African Americans after adjusting for the same variables, they said.
“It’s very important to note that these results do not suggest that people should start taking melatonin without consulting their doctor,” said Feixiong Cheng, a staff assistant in Cleveland and lead author of the study.
“Large-scale observational studies and randomized controlled trials are essential to validate the clinical benefit of melatonin for patients with COVID-19, but we are excited about the associations highlighted in this study and the desirability of them. explore more, ”Cheng said.
Researchers leveraged network medicine methodologies and large-scale electronic patient health records from the Cleveland Clinic to identify clinical manifestations and common pathologies between COVID-19 and other diseases.
In particular, they measured the proximity between host genes / proteins and those well associated with 64 other diseases in several disease categories.
In these disease categories, including malignant cancer and lung disease, closer proximity indicates a higher likelihood of pathological associations between diseases, the researchers said.
They found, for example, that proteins associated with respiratory distress syndrome and sepsis, two leading causes of death in patients with severe COVID-19, were closely related to several proteins in SARS-CoV-2.
“This signals us then that a drug already approved to treat these respiratory conditions may have some utility in the treatment of COVID-19 as well by acting on these common biological targets,” Cheng explained.
They determined that autoimmune, pulmonary and neurological diseases exhibited significant network proximity to the SARS-CoV-2 genes / proteins and identified 34 drugs as candidates for reuse, including the major melatonin.
“Recent studies suggest that COVID-19 is a systematic disease affecting several types of cells, tissues and organs, so knowledge of the complex interactions between the virus and other diseases is essential to understand the complications of COVID-19 and identify reusable drugs, ”Cheng said.
“Our study provides a powerful and integrative network medicine strategy to predict disease manifestations associated with COVID-19 and facilitate the search for an effective treatment,” he added.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
