The method of novel drug identification involved a systematic chemoinformatic drug search combined with a pathway-centric analysis.
Credit: Nhemz / Shutterstock. Researchers from the Quantitative Biosciences Institute (QBI) Covid-19 Research Group (QCRG) at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and their collaborators have identified 69 potential Covid-19 drug candidates and experimental compounds by studying the genes of Covid-19 to determine its mechanism of infection of human cells.
Of these candidates, 24 are already US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved to treat other indications. Repurposing these drugs could mean seeing faster results than by waiting on a novel drug discovery.