COMPARE Analysis, a Bioinformatic Approach to Accelerate Drug Repurposing against Covid-19 and Other Emerging Epidemics

A novel bioinformatic approach for drug repurposing against emerging viral epidemics like Covid-19 is described. It exploits the COMPARE algorithm, a public program from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to sort drugs according to their patterns of growth inhibitory profiles from a diverse panel of human cancer cell lines. The data repository of the NCI includes the growth inhibitory patterns of more than 55,000 molecules. When candidate drug molecules with ostensible anti-SARS-CoV-2 activities were used as seeds (e.g., hydroxychloroquine, ritonavir, and dexamethasone) in COMPARE, the analysis uncovered several molecules with fingerprints similar to the seeded drugs. Interestingly, despite the fact that the uncovered drugs were from various pharmacological classes (antiarrhythmic, nucleosides, antipsychotic, alkaloids, antibiotics, and vitamins), they were all reportedly known from published literature to exert antiviral activities via different modes, confirming that COMPARE analysis is efficient for predicting antiviral activities of drugs from various pharmacological classes. Noticeably, several of the uncovered drugs can be readily tested, like didanosine, methotrexate, vitamin A, nicotinamide, valproic acid, uridine, and flucloxacillin. Unlike pure in silico methods, this approach is biologically more relevant and able to pharmacologically correlate compounds regardless of their chemical structures. This is an untapped resource, reliable and readily exploitable for drug repurposing against current and future viral outbreaks.