AI Platform Repositions Drugs That Can Combat Blood Clotting and Inflammation in COVID-19 Patients

A bioscience firm is applying artificial intelligence (AI) and data science to identify existing drugs as potentially effective therapies for blood clots and inflammation caused by COVID-19.

Biovista (Charlottesville, VA, USA), an AI-driven bioscience firm that has been repositioning drugs for over a decade, has announced two newly repositioned drugs with the potential to combat key symptoms of COVID-19. Biovista has identified Cablivi and Atozet as particularly suited to target specific aspects of blood clotting and inflammation in the context of COVID-19. This follows the strong mechanistic rationale released by the company in March, suggesting Aprotinin and Irbesartan as potential COVID-19 treatments to reduce the effects of the cytokine storm as well as helping reduce viral loads.

Biovista's AI platform, Project Prodigy, maps all known drugs against every possible mechanism in which the COVID-19 virus operates and causes complications. In addition to proposing possible treatments for further study, Biovista's AI is supporting the global response to COVID-19 and other deadly diseases. The company has made portions of Project Prodigy publicly accessible through their data and hypothesis exploration tool called VIZIT. In June alone, VIZIT provided answers to over 20,000 unique searches made by scientists and drug developers in over 75 countries.

"We continue to focus on possible solutions for key complications, or sequelae, of COVID-19," said Dr. Aris Persidis, president and co-founder of Biovista. "With our latest rolling drug repositioning update, we address the micro-blood clots in the lungs and hearts of COVID-19 patients that can have devastating consequences, and suggest treatments."

"Typical machine learning AIs aren't designed for something like COVID-19, where what happens next is unknown," added Dr. Persidis. "Biovista's Project Prodigy is a game-changer AI because it is designed to go where matching and classifying AIs stop. Project Prodigy recombines all known data points to build entirely new scenarios, and that's our edge."

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