Journal
DRUG DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH
Volume 81, Issue 7, Pages 777-781Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/ddr.21689
Keywords
COVID-19; drug repositioning; drug repurposing; electronic health records (EHR); TMPRSS2
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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 , 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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