Network-based Drug Repurposing for Human Coronavirus

Yadi Zhou; Yuan Hou; Jiayu Shen; Yin Huang; William Martin; Feixiong Cheng

Although investment in biomedical and pharmaceutical research and development has increased significantly over the past two decades, the annual number of new treatments approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has remained relatively constant and limited [6] . A recent study estimated that pharmaceutical companies spent $2.6 billion in 2015, up from $802 million in 2003, in the development of an FDA-approved new chemical entity drug [7] . Drug repurposing, represented as an effective drug discovery strategy from existing drugs, could significantly shorten the time and reduce the cost compared to de novo drug discovery and randomized clinical trials [8] [9] [10] . However, experimental approaches for drug repurposing is costly and timeconsuming. [11] Computational approaches offer novel testable hypotheses for systematic drug repositioning [8-10, 12, 13] . However, traditional structure-based methods are limited when three-dimensional (3D) structures of proteins are unavailable, which, unfortunately, is the case for the majority of human and viral targets. In addition, targeting single virus proteins often have high risk of drug resistance by the rapid evolution of virus genomes [1] .