An ensemble approach for prioritizing antivirals against COVID-19 via heterogeneous network inference-based inductive matrix completion

The global spread of COVID-19 caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) originated in Wuhan in December 2019, created a massive health crisis, and disrupted the world economy. Much research has been conducted to discover drugs, develop vaccines, and find repurposable drugs against the disease. Computational drug repurposing, the process of determining new uses for approved drugs through computational techniques, becomes an effective solution to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims to investigate and prioritize potential drugs against SARS-CoV-2 through an integrated network-based approach. We propose an ensemble approach based on network inference and inductive matrix completion (NIMCVDA) for virus–drug association prediction to identify antivirals against COVID-19. We constructed a heterogeneous drug–virus network using intra-similarities of virus genomic sequences and drug chemical structures and existing associations between viruses and drugs. A network inference method is used to infer missing drug–virus edges. Based on this, existing drug–virus association matrix is reconstructed. Finally, more accurate association scores between drugs and viruses are computed using the inductive matrix completion algorithm. The proposed method achieved an AUC of 0.9020 on five-fold cross-validation and 0.8786 on leave-one-out cross-validation. We compared the performance of the model with related approaches. In addition, we carried out case studies on the top-predicted drugs and implemented our model with other datasets to verify prediction performance. Our work prioritized repurposable drugs to battle with COVID-19 epidemic. The cross-validation results and case studies illustrate that the top-predicted drugs are strong candidates for further biological tests.