PerkinElmer Launches Online, Open Access COVID-19 Data Dashboards to Accelerate Discovery of Antivirals and Vaccines

PerkinElmer, Inc. (Waltham, MA; USA) has launched two online, free-access COVID-19 Data Dashboards to help the global scientific community accelerate the discovery of COVID-19 antivirals and vaccines.

The dashboards are powered by PerkinElmer’s data analytics and data visualization solutions which help researchers more quickly and easily leverage the vast amounts of drug compound and clinical trial data that exist across reliable, yet disparate, sites and sources. These user-friendly COVID-19 dashboards are supported by PerkinElmer’s Signals Lead Discovery and the TIBCO Spotfire advanced analytics platform (with built in artificial intelligence functionality). Together, they provide a robust, easy-to-use solution for searching, aggregating and visualizing complex, scientific data.

Using the PerkinElmer COVID-19 Drug Compound Dashboard, scientists can narrow down the 1.6 million drug compounds that are publicly available by querying a curated chemical substance dataset and related activity data provided by CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society that specializes in scientific information solutions. The included CAS COVID-19 Antiviral Candidate Compound Dataset is an open source data collection assembled by CAS scientists from the CAS REGISTRY that contains ~50,000 known antiviral drugs and related chemical compounds that are structurally similar to known antivirals. This, combined with the dashboard’s ability to cross-reference against 15 million bioactivity data points of drug-like molecules from ChEMBL (part of the European Bioinformatics Institute), can help researchers narrow the field down to 100 or less key compounds relevant to them for further exploration. The paring down happens rapidly through a series of search filters applied to the larger data sets like pulmonary respiratory indicators, SARS-CoV-2, protein structures, pathogens, peptides and more.

The second, streamlined resource, the PerkinElmer COVID-19 Clinical Trial Dashboard, pulls together data from sources such as the US National Library of Medicine’s clinicaltrials.gov. Here, scientists can select relevant information on trials for COVID-19 including trial status, lead organization(s), drug compounds being studied and use of live or dead virus, antibody, antiviral or DNA-based vaccine approaches.

“As global scientists work tirelessly to create or repurpose antiviral drugs and vaccines for COVID-19, there are massive amounts of existing public data that can be invaluable to these efforts. However, bringing together, combing through and harnessing that data in real time can be a real challenge,” said Kevin Willoe VP, GM of Informatics, PerkinElmer. “By collaborating with organizations like TIBCO and CAS on the new PerkinElmer COVID-19 Dashboards, we put the power of analytics at the fingertips of scientists to help drive actionable insights earlier in the discovery process. These dashboards are tools to help them spend more time being scientists and less time being data managers which is critical when working to combat the challenges faced by COVID-19 researchers.”