AI Platform Identifies Top Candidate Drugs for Treatment of COVID-19

A systems pharmacology platform powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and developed by AI VIVO (Cambridge, UK) has identified the top candidate drugs that are highly likely to be effective in treating COVID-19 disease. AI VIVO’s highly optimized prediction engine took just 15 days to rank 90,000 candidate compounds in order of efficacy – identifying a shortlist of 31 candidate drugs that are already approved and in use for other human diseases/conditions or in Phase II/Phase III clinical trials. The company has already begun talks with the UK government and others to initiate trials of the approved drugs. These Top 31 drugs comprise 0.05% of the ranked candidates and the list shows promising overlap with existing scientific research.

Five of the top-ranked drugs on the list, that have already entered clinical trials for COVID-19, include Chloroquine, the anti-malarial drug; Dexamethasone, a commonly used corticosteroid; Sirolimus, an immuno-suppressant drug; Tacrolimus, an immuno-suppressant drug; and Thalidomide, a cancer treatment drug. For the well-known drug Chloroquine, the AI VIVO system identifies how the drug’s efficacy could be improved and side effects moderated by combining the drug with other compounds from AI VIVO’s Top 31 to create a more effective treatment.


AI VIVO specializes in a powerful phenotypic approach to drug discovery that still works when little is known about disease specific targets. AI VIVO started by building a phenotypic model of the impact of COVID-19 on the lungs using real samples from COVID-19 infected cells, enabling it to identify unexpected compounds that could treat COVID-19 by moderating the undesirable phenotypic changes that it causes. AI VIVO now plans to test combinations of drugs from their top ranking, to take advantage of their synergistic modes of action to achieve greater treatment efficacy.

“We believe identifying phenotypic changes in disease states is key to finding effective therapies. There is little known about the COVID-19 virus itself, its effect on the host tissue and potential targets for discovery research,” said Peyman Gifani, PhD, AI VIVO founder and CEO. “This limits our knowledge about the best targets for COVID-19 and means that AI VIVO’s phenotypic approach could provide the most powerful, logical and rapid pathway to COVID-19 drug discovery.”

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