Discovering Missing Edges in Drug-Protein Networks: Repurposing Drugs for SARS-CoV-2

The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, led to a global health crisis, with more than 157 million cases confirmed infected by May 2021. Effective medication is desperately needed. Predicting drug-target interaction (DTI) is an important step to discover novel uses of chemical structures. Here, we develop a pipeline to predict novel DTIs based on the proteins of the coronavirus. Different datasets (human/SARS-CoV-2 Protein-Protein interaction (PPI), Drug-Drug similarity (DD sim), and DTIs) are used and combined. After mapping all datasets onto a heterogeneous graph, path-related features are extracted. We then applied various machine learning (ML) algorithms to model our dataset and predict novel DTIs among unlabeled pairs. Possible drugs identified by the models with a high frequency are reported. In addition, evidence of the efficiency of the predicted medicines by the models against COVID-19 are presented. The proposed model can then be generalized to contain other features that provide a context to predict medicine for different diseases.