NeuroCOV Research Featured at 1st PhD and Postdocs Symposium at Human Technopole, Milan, Italy

On June 25th, NeuroCOV partner Human Technopole hosted their first PhD symposium. The event provided PhD students and postdocs with the opportunity to share their work with the institution community through a poster or a talk. One of NeuroCOV’s PhD students, Flavio Passante, prepared and presented a poster describing his work and contribution to the project.

The poster, entitled “Exploiting Compound’s Side Effects for Computational Drug Repurposing for NeuroCOV,” introduces the basics of drug repurposing, explaining its usefulness and advantages over the standard de novo drug discovery processes. In the NeuroCOV project, we are developing a computational method capable of predicting drug candidates that can be repositioned to ameliorate symptoms of NeuroCOVID. The method combines gene expression perturbation given by the compound’s treatment with the side effects of the compounds themselves. By comparing the transcriptional perturbations caused by two different drugs, it is possible to define an extent of similarity between them, leading to new repurposing hypotheses. On the other hand, side effects imply the involvement of a drug in many pathways, suggesting that some of them can be therapeutically helpful for conditions different from the one the drug was designed for. NeuroCOV has demonstrated that drug-induced transcriptional perturbations are reflective of the compound’s side effects, carrying information that can be deconvoluted and inspected, leading to novel repurposing opportunities.