Functional Genetics and Machine Learning Approaches for COVID19 Drug Repurposing

A complete understanding of the human genes that are necessary for SARS-COV-2 infection and replication is needed to develop new drugs or repurpose existing drugs. This proposal uses public genome-wide CRISPR/Cas9 screening datasets and machine learning approaches to repurpose existing drugs for SARS-COV-2 treatment, including (1) integrating public SARS-COV-2 CRISPR screens from multiple studies to get a comprehensive map of human host gene - SARS-COV-2 interactions, (2) use our existing drug repurposing framework to predict drug-gene interactions, and (3) unbiasedly predict potential drugs from over 4,000 candidates for SARS-COV-2 treatment.