Drug Repositioning for SARS-CoV-2 Based on Graph Neural Network

Abstract

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the strain of coronavirus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which leads to over 800,000 deaths and is still no specific medicines. Drug repositioning aiming to infer potential drugs for diseases and achieve much attention during the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic. However, find a specific drug of SARS-CoV-2 is still a large challenge that cannot be addressed well with current methods. To overcome this problem, we present a novel drug repositioning framework of heterogeneous graph convolutional networks for SARS-CoV2. The deep2CoV model can effectively search the potential drugs for SARS-CoV-2, which reduce the number of clinical trials and drug development cycles. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of our proposed deep2CoV framework.