An ages-old issue may be on the road to modern solutions, thanks to a new collaboration between the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and Clarivate that will use advanced computer methods to find therapeutics for use on chlorine and sulfur mustard-caused injuries.
Specifically, the pair want to find existing drugs that can be repurposed for use as medical countermeasures (MCMs) against two highly corrosive agents, best known for the burns they can induce in the eyes, skin and lungs.
Through the Repurposing Drugs in Response to Chemical Threats (ReDIRECT) program, BARDA evaluates therapeutics already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or that are in late-stage development. In this case, the program will fund Clarivate as it uses tools to pursue a high-throughput experiment performed through computer simulations (in silico) and narrow down a list of commonly available drugs that could be used as MCMs for exposure to chemical agents.
This, BARDA attested, could grant a leg up compared to conventional drug discovery, which can involve a lengthy and costly process filled with studies of potentially limited scope or capability, due to the interactions between drug compounds and the human body. Instead, BARDA will support target identification and drug factor analyses for finding these drugs, specifically ones that could be easily accessible to hospitals and pharmacies. Special attention will be paid to those that could treat symptoms of diseases that are also symptoms of chemical agent exposure.
In its analyses, Clarivate will focus on assessing genomic experiments, systems, computational biology, protein-protein interactions and molecular pathways open to its curated databases. Its AI algorithms should allow it to evaluate large data sets swiftly and pull helpful information to provide to researchers.
Currently, no FDA-approved drugs exist for the treatment of chlorine exposure, nor for the ocular and respiratory injuries caused by sulfur mustard, despite their use to devastating effect as far back as World War I. This new effort at a solution also represents the first project funded by the BARDA DRIVe ReDIRECT program, devoted to machine learning- and AI-based capabilities.