Cyclica Teams Up with Top-Tier Academic Institutions to Identify a Repurposed Drug for COVID -- Cyclica New 2021

With Canadian infection rates recently breaking the 1 million mark and deaths topping 23,000 and counting, and the global infection rate reaching 132 million, with nearly 3 million deaths to date, intervention is critical. "By targeting human proteins necessary for the coronavirus lifecycle, we are developing therapeutic strategies applicable to future strains or variants" said Dr. Bo Wang of the Vector Institute. "Unlike high throughput screens, accurate AI predictions aimed at specific human-based, antiviral targets provided us with a risk-adjusted strategy to search for drug-repurposing opportunities using scientifically accurate experiments with high biological relevance." The discovery of capmatinib's antiviral activity is a shining example of the power of collaborative research programs. The Vector Institute team's graph convolutional network (GCN) identified possible human targets relevant to COVID-19, which fed directly into Cyclica's PolypharmDB - a database for finding repurposing opportunities, generated using Cyclica's deep learning approach MatchMaker.