COVID-19: Development of novel human coronavirus infection assays to accelerate AI-driven drug repurposing for COVID-19

SARS-CoV-2感染导致COVID-19，这种疾病已迅速成为全球大流行病，全球有超过500万人感染，超过325，000人死于该疾病（截至2020年5月20日）。这种疾病的重大健康、经济和社会成本和负担迫切需要新的疗法，这些疗法可以限制感染在受影响个体中的传播，限制感染在个体之间的传播，并治疗表现出严重疾病症状的患者。 由于疫苗的开发预计仅需12-18个月，因此迫切需要开发抗病毒药物，以限制感染的传播和受感染个体的疾病严重程度。药物再利用是一种对快速开发新的COVID-19抗病毒治疗具有巨大希望的方法。Cyclica Inc是一家专门从事人工智能（AI）驱动技术研究药物-蛋白质相互作用的公司。Cyclica开发了一个管道，可以识别预计有可能被重新用于治疗COVID-19的药物。为了能够做到这一点，必须用新的检测SARS-CoV-2和其他冠状病毒感染细胞的检测方法来补充现有的药物-蛋白质相互作用的AI驱动分析。 我们的研究旨在完成两件事：（1）开发一套基于荧光报告蛋白的新测定，其允许通过高内容成像和自动化图像分析检测病毒感染，允许病毒感染测定的缩放，以及（2）用AI驱动的分析预测的药物对这些测定进行基准测试，以削弱冠状病毒感染，以建立这些测定作为冠状病毒感染测定的金标准。虽然这项研究旨在研究基础细胞生物学，以实现检测开发，但它将对COVID-19治疗的进一步快速开发具有关键应用。

SARS-CoV-2 infection leads to COVID-19, a disease that has rapidly become a global pandemic, with >5M individuals infected and >325,000 deaths from the disease worldwide (as of May 20th, 2020). The significant health, economic and social cost and burden of this disease urgently requires new therapies that can limit the spread of infection in affected individuals, limit the spread of infection between individuals and to treat patients that exhibit severe disease symptoms. With the development of vaccines expected only in 12-18 months, there is an urgent need for the development of antivirals to limit the spread of infection and the severity of the disease in infected individuals. Drug repurposing is an approach that holds great promise for rapid development of new COVID-19 antiviral treatments. Cyclica Inc is a company that specializes in artificial intelligence (AI)-driven technologies to study drug-protein interactions. Cyclica has developed a pipeline that allows identification of drugs that are predicted to have potential to be repurposed to treat COVID-19. To be able to do so, it is essential to complement the existing AI-driven analysis of drug-protein interactions with novel assays for detection of cell infection by SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses. Our research aims to accomplish two things: (1) develop a new suite of assays based on fluorescent reporter proteins that allow detection of virus infection by high content imaging and automated image analysis, allowing scaling of virus infection assays and (2) benchmark these assays with drugs predicted by the AI-driven analysis to impair coronavirus infection, in order to establish these assays as the gold standard coronavirus infection assays. While this research aims to study fundamental cell biology allowing for assay development, it will have key applications to the further rapid development of COVID-19 treatments.