Drugs intervention study in COVID-19 management

Plant Spices as a Source of Antimicrobial Synergic Molecules to Treat Bacterial and Viral Co-Infections

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the lack of antiviral agents available for human use, while the complexity of the physiological changes caused by coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) imposed the prescription of multidrug pharmacotherapy to treat infected patients. In a significant number of cases, it was necessary to add antibiotics to the prescription to decrease the risk of co-infections, preventing the worsening of the patient's condition. However, the precautionary use of antibiotics corroborated to increase bacterial resistance. Since the development of vaccines for COVID-19, the pandemic scenario has changed, but the development of new antiviral drugs is still a major challenge. Research for new drugs with synergistic activity against virus and resistant bacteria can produce drug leads to be used in the treatment of mild cases of COVID-19 and to fight other viruses and new viral diseases. Following the repurposing approach, plant spices have been searched for antiviral lead compounds, since the toxic effects of plants that are traditionally consumed are already known, speeding up the drug discovery process. The need for effective drugs in the context of viral diseases is discussed in this review, with special focus on plant-based spices with antiviral and antibiotic activity. The activity of plants against resistant bacteria, the diversity of the components present in plant extracts and the synergistic interaction of these metabolites and industrialized antibiotics are discussed, with the aim of contributing to the development of antiviral and antibiotic drugs. A literature search was performed in electronic databases such as Science Direct; SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online); LILACS (Latin American and Caribbean Literature on Health Sciences); Elsevier, SpringerLink; and Google Scholar, using the descriptors: antiviral plants, antibacterial plants, coronavirus treatment, morbidities and COVID-19, bacterial resistance, resistant antibiotics, hospital-acquired infections, spices of plant origin, coronaviruses and foods, spices with antiviral effect, drug prescriptions and COVID-19, and plant synergism. Articles published in English in the period from 2020 to 2022 and relevant to the topic were used as the main inclusion criteria.

Lactoferrin for COVID-19 prevention, treatment, and recovery

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), a unique beta-coronavirus, has caused the most serious outbreak of the last century at the global level. SARS-CoV-2 infections were firstly reported in the city of Wuhan in China in 2019 and this new disease was named COVID-19 by World Health Organization (WHO). As this novel disease can easily be transmitted from one individual to another via respiratory droplets, many nations around the world have taken several precautions regarding the reduction in social activities and quarantine for the limitation of the COVID-19 transmission. SARS-CoV-2 is known to cause complications that may include pneumonia, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), multi-organ failure, septic shock, and death. To prevent and treat COVID-19, some significant studies have been conducted since the outbreak. One of the most noticeable therapeutic approaches is related to a multifunctional protein, lactoferrin. Lactoferrin (Lf) is an 80 kDa cationic glycoprotein that has a great range of benefits from improving the immunity to antiviral effects due to its unique characteristics such as the iron-binding ability. This review summarizes the characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 and the potential applications of Lf for the prevention, treatment, and recovery of COVID-19.

Task-driven knowledge graph filtering improves prioritizing drugs for repurposing

Background

Drug repurposing aims at finding new targets for already developed drugs. It becomes more relevant as the cost of discovering new drugs steadily increases. To find new potential targets for a drug, an abundance of methods and existing biomedical knowledge from different domains can be leveraged. Recently, knowledge graphs have emerged in the biomedical domain that integrate information about genes, drugs, diseases and other biological domains. Knowledge graphs can be used to predict new connections between compounds and diseases, leveraging the interconnected biomedical data around them. While real world use cases such as drug repurposing are only interested in one specific relation type, widely used knowledge graph embedding models simultaneously optimize over all relation types in the graph. This can lead the models to underfit the data that is most relevant for the desired relation type. For example, if we want to learn embeddings to predict links between compounds and diseases but almost the entirety of relations in the graph is incident to other pairs of entity types, then the resulting embeddings are likely not optimised to predict links between compounds and diseases. We propose a method that leverages domain knowledge in the form of metapaths and use them to filter two biomedical knowledge graphs (Hetionet and DRKG) for the purpose of improving performance on the prediction task of drug repurposing while simultaneously increasing computational efficiency.

Results

We find that our method reduces the number of entities by 60% on Hetionet and 26% on DRKG, while leading to an improvement in prediction performance of up to 40.8% on Hetionet and 14.2% on DRKG, with an average improvement of 20.6% on Hetionet and 8.9% on DRKG. Additionally, prioritization of antiviral compounds for SARS CoV-2 improves after task-driven filtering is applied.

Conclusion

Knowledge graphs contain facts that are counter productive for specific tasks, in our case drug repurposing. We also demonstrate that these facts can be removed, resulting in an improved performance in that task and a more efficient learning process.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12859-022-04608-y.

Low dose ionizing radiation and the immune response: what is the role of non-targeted effects?

OBJECTIVES

This review aims to trace the historical narrative surrounding the low dose effects of radiation on the immune system and how our understanding has changed from the beginning of the 20th century to now. The particular focus is on the non-targeted effects (NTEs) of low dose ionizing radiation (LDIR) which are effects that occur when irradiated cells emit signals that cause effects in the nearby or distant non-irradiated cells known as radiation induced bystander effect (RIBE). Moreover, radiation induced genomic instability (RIGI) and abscopal effect (AE) also regarded as NTE. This was prompted by our recent discovery that ultraviolet A (UVA) photons are emitted by the irradiated cells and that these photons can trigger NTE such as the RIBE in unirradiated recipients of these photons. Given the well-known association between UV radiation and the immune response, where these biophotons may pose as bystander signals potentiating processes in deep tissues as a consequence of LDIR, it is timely to review the field with a fresh lens. Various pathways and immune components that contribute to the beneficial and adverse types of modulation induced by LDR will also be revisited.

CONCLUSION

There is limited evidence for LDIR induced immune effects by way of a non-targeted mechanism in biological tissue. The literature examining low to medium dose effects of ionizing radiation on the immune system and its components is complex and controversial. Early work was compromised by lack of good dosimetry while later work mainly looks at the involvement of immune response in radiotherapy. There is a lack of research in the LDIR/NTE field focusing on immune response although bone marrow stem cells and lineages were critical in the identification and characterization of NTE where effects like RIGI and RIBE were heavily researched. This may be in part, a result of the difficulty of isolating NTE in whole organisms which are essential for good immune response studies. Models involving inter organism transmission of NTE are a promising route to overcome these issues.

Elucidating of oxidative distress in COVID-19 and methods of its prevention

The pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 stimulates significant efforts and approaches to understand its global spread. Although the recent introduction of the vaccine is a crucial prophylactic step, the effective treatment for SARS-CoV-2 is still undiscovered. An in-depth analysis of symptoms and clinical parameters, as well as molecular changes, is necessary to comprehend COVID-19 and propose a remedy for affected people to fight that disease.

The analysis of available clinical data and SARS-CoV-2 infection markers underlined the main pathogenic process in COVID-19 is cytokine storm and inflammation. That led us to suggest that the most important pathogenic feature of SARS-CoV-2 leading to COVID-19 is oxidative stress and cellular damage stimulated by iron, a source of Fenton reaction and its product hydroxyl radical (•OH), the most reactive ROS with t_1/2–10⁻⁹s. Therefore we suggest some scavenging agents are a reasonable choice for overcoming its toxic effect and can be regarded as a treatment for the disease on the molecular level.