Diba Dindoust

The Knowledge Society, Canada

Title: Drug Repurposing with Artificial Intelligence

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Biography

Diba Dindoust is a 17-year-old innovator and visionary who is excited about building the future of biotechnology. She has built projects in the fields of gene editing, synthetic biology and computational drug discovery. Her work has been showcased on IBM’s CASCON x Evoke and the TEDx stage. While attending high school, she enjoys publishing STEM-related articles on her Medium blog and You tube channel, as well as working on her newly-released podcast Biotech Mafia alongside other young innovators to discuss the future of biotechnology.

Abstract

An overview of the current state of drug repurposing and how artificial intelligence (AI) is applied as a tool. One cost-effective way of finding therapies for diseases is the repurposing of approved or investigational drugs for new targets. Examples of repurposed drugs are remdesivir for COVID-19 and thalidomide for multiple myeloma. The cost of drug repurposing is lower than de novo drug discovery because repurposing does not require preclinical testing if there is dose compatibility between the original and new targets. AI has been applied in drug repurposing in the processes of target and leads identification to reduce the rate of failure in human trials. AI had been used to identify multiple repurposed drugs for COVID-19 other than remdesivir. AI models that have been employed are deep learning models and classifiers alongside molecular docking. In my project, I looked at repurposing drugs with lower costing APIs for HIV with the goal of reducing the cost of local production of antiretroviral therapy in African countries. My prototype identified glyburide - a diabetes drug - as a potential candidate for HIV from a small sample group.