COVID-19 Multi-Targeted Drug Repurposing Using Few-Shot Learning

Abstract

The life-threatening disease COVID-19 has inspired significant efforts to discover novel therapeutic agents through repurposing of existing drugs. Although multi-targeted (polypharmacological) therapies are recognized as the most efficient approach to system diseases such as COVID-19, computational multi-targeted compound screening has been limited by the scarcity of high-quality experimental data and difficulties in extracting information from molecules. This study introduces <i>MolGNN</i>, a new deep learning model for molecular property prediction. <i>MolGNN</i> applies a graph neural network to computational learning of chemical molecule embedding. Comparing to state-of-the-art approaches heavily relying on labeled experimental data, our method achieves equivalent or superior prediction performance without manual labels in the pretraining stage, and excellent performance on data with only a few labels. Our results indicate that <i>MolGNN</i> is robust to scarce training data, and hence a powerful few-shot learning tool. <i>MolGNN</i> predicted several multi-targeted molecules against both human Janus kinases and the SARS-CoV-2 main protease, which are preferential targets for drugs aiming, respectively, at alleviating cytokine storm COVID-19 symptoms and suppressing viral replication. We also predicted molecules potentially inhibiting cell death induced by SARS-CoV-2. Several of <i>MolGNN</i> top predictions are supported by existing experimental and clinical evidence, demonstrating the potential value of our method.