A network representation approach for COVID-19 drug recommendation

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has outbreak since early December 2019, and COVID-19 has caused over 100 million cases and 2 million deaths around the world. After one year of the COVID-19 outbreak, there is no certain and approve medicine against it. Drug repositioning has become one line of scientific research that is being pursued to develop an effective drug. However, due to the lack of COVID-19 data, there is still no specific drug repositioning targeting the COVID-19. In this paper, we propose a framework for COVID-19 drug repositioning. This framework has several advantages that can be exploited: one is that a local graph aggregating representation is used across a heterogeneous network to address the data sparsity problem; another is the multi hop neighbors of the heterogeneous graph are aggregated to recall as many COVID-19 potential drugs as possible. Our experimental results show that our COVDR framework performs significantly better than baseline methods, and the docking simulation verifies that our three potential drugs have the ability to against COVID-19 disease.