Identification of Repurposable Drugs and Adverse Drug Reactions for Various Courses of COVID-19 Based on Single-Cell RNA Sequencing Data

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has impacted almost every part of human life worldwide, posing a massive threat to human health. There is no specific drug for COVID-19, highlighting the urgent need for the development of effective therapeutics. To identify potentially repurposable drugs, we employed a systematic approach to mine candidates from U.S. FDA-approved drugs and preclinical small-molecule compounds by integrating the gene expression perturbation data for chemicals from the Library of Integrated Network-Based Cellular Signatures project with a publicly available single-cell RNA sequencing dataset from mild and severe COVID-19 patients. We identified 281 FDA-approved drugs that have the potential to be effective against SARS-CoV-2 infection, 16 of which are currently undergoing clinical trials to evaluate their efficacy against COVID-19. We experimentally tested the inhibitory effects of tyrphostin-AG-1478 and brefeldin-a on the replication of the single-stranded ribonucleic acid (ssRNA) virus influenza A virus. In conclusion, we have identified a list of repurposable anti-SARS-CoV-2 drugs using a systems biology approach.