Repurposing current therapeutics for treating COVID-19: A vital role of prescription records data mining |
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Authors: | David Gurwitz |
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Affiliation: | Department of Human Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv, Israel |
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Abstract: | Since its outbreak in late 2019, the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic already infected over 3.7 million people and claimed more than 250,000 lives globally. At least 1 year may take for an approved vaccine to be in place, and meanwhile millions more could be infected, some with fatal outcome. Over thousand clinical trials with COVID-19 patients are already listed in ClinicalTrials.com , some of them for assessing the utility of therapeutics approved for other conditions. However, clinical trials take many months, and are typically done with small cohorts. A much faster and by far more efficient method for rapidly identifying approved therapeutics that can be repurposed for treating COVID-19 patients is data mining their past and current electronic health and prescription records for identifying drugs that may protect infected individuals from severe COVID-19 symptoms. Examples are discussed for applying health and prescription records for assessing the potential repurposing (repositioning) of angiotensin receptor blockers, estradiol, or antiandrogens for reducing COVID-19 morbidity and fatalities. Data mining of prescription records of COVID-19 patients will not cancel the need for conducting controlled clinical trials, but could substantially assist in trial design, drug choice, inclusion and exclusion criteria, and prioritization. This approach requires a strong commitment of health provides for open collaboration with the biomedical research community, as health provides are typically the sole owners of retrospective drug prescription records. |
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Keywords: | COVID-19 drug repositioning drug repurposing electronic health records (EHR) TMPRSS2 |
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