Drug repurposing project targets Covid-19

A project has been launched to identify drug combinations which can be repurposed as potential therapeutic candidates for Covid-19.

Project RE has been launched by drug development company Relation Therapeutics and will focus on finding therapies to tackle viral entry and replication. The project is being co-led between Mila (Quebec AI Institute) and Relation Therapeutics. Part of the project’s goals is to develop a platform to develop therapies that modulate the immune response through distinct stages of infection.

Project RE will utilise machine learning techniques in an effort to advance computational drug development and has received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Dr Charles Campbell Roberts, Relation Therapeutics’ chairperson, said: “Relation is honoured to work with the Gates Foundation in seeking to rapidly identify Covid-19 therapeutic candidates. Graph ML is at the cutting edge of machine learning, underlying core recommender technologies at tech giants such as Pinterest and is a key research topic at DeepMind. Relation is amongst the first to deploy these approaches directly in drug development, and has been deeply fortunate in attracting so many of the leading scientists in the space to this mission.” 

Professor Yoshua Bengio, Mila founder, said: “Using advances in machine learning we can integrate many sources of information about a disease, and build systems that improve over time using active learning. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has identified this approach as a perfect opportunity to use ML to correctly identify and evaluate potential drug combinations as therapeutic approaches for Covid-19, by searching colossal combinatorial space as fast as possible.”