Computational repurposing of drugs for viral diseases and current and future pandemics

A large fraction of the world’s population is directly impacted by acute or chronic viral infections, many of which have high mortality. As was brought home to us in 2020, viruses also have great potential to generate global pandemics that have killed millions and caused massive damage to economies. Clearly, we need cost-effective and rapid methods for finding drug treatments for poorly met infectious diseases and for responding effectively to the current and future pandemics. Repurposing or off-label use of existing drugs, whose safety and pharmacokinetics are well understood, is one useful way to provide fast drug therapies for patients. Computational methods have an important role to play because of their increasing effectiveness, high speed, and relatively low cost. Here we review the application of the main types of computational drug repurposing methods to discovery of therapies for viral diseases and for future pandemics highly likely to be caused by viral pathogens.