COVID-19," said Anandasankar Ray, a professor at the University of California, Riverside in the US."We have developed a drug discovery pipeline that identified several candidates," said Ray, who led the research published in the journal Heliyon.The drug discovery pipeline is a type of computational strategy linked to AI -- a computer algorithm that learns to predict activity through trial and error, improving over time.With no clear end in sight, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted lives, strained health care systems, and weakened economies, the researchers said.Efforts to repurpose drugs, such as Remdesivir, have achieved some success.