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In the COVID-19 pandemic, drug repositioning has presented itself as an alternative to the time-consuming process of generating new drugs. This review describes a drug repurposing process that is based on a new data-driven approach: we put forward five information paths that associate COVID-19-related genes and COVID-19 symptoms with drugs that directly target these gene products, that target the symptoms or that treat diseases that are symptomatically or genetically similar to COVID-19. The intersection of the five information paths results in a list of 13 drugs that we suggest as potential candidates against COVID-19. In addition, we have found information in published studies and in clinical trials that support the therapeutic potential of the drugs in our final list.

Rare diseases are a group of uncommon diseases in the world population. To date, about 7000 rare diseases have been documented. However, most of them do not have a known treatment. As a result of the relatively low demand for their treatments caused by their scarce prevalence, the pharmaceutical industry has not sufficiently encouraged the research to develop drugs to treat them. This work aims to analyse potential drug-repositioning strategies for this kind of disease. Drug repositioning seeks to find new uses for existing drugs. In this context, it seeks to discover if rare diseases could be treated with medicines previously indicated to heal other diseases. Our approaches tackle the problem by employing computational methods that calculate similarities between rare and non-rare diseases, considering biological features such as genes, proteins, and symptoms. Drug candidates for repositioning will be checked against clinical trials found in the scientific literature. In this study, 13 different rare diseases have been selected for which potential drugs could be repositioned. By verifying these drugs in the scientific literature, successful cases were found for 75% of the rare diseases studied. The genetic associations and phenotypical features of the rare diseases were examined. In addition, the verified drugs were classified according to the anatomical therapeutic chemical (ATC) code to highlight the types with a higher predisposition to be repositioned. These promising results open the door for further research in this field of study.

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