Abstract

Sudden rise of SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and the subsequent waves of variants had severe impact on society and the scientific community had to look for effective treatment options while still learning about the virus and the Covid-19 disease. Fortunately, vaccinations helped reduce the burden on hospitals, yet effective treatment options are still needed to mitigate this disease and to prevent long-term effect. Towards this drug repurposing and screening technologies could be used in efficient, accelerated way to provide for new potential treatments but also to generate data that is useful for future research in drug discovery. Drug repurposing libraries such as SPECS compound collection with more than of 5200 compounds with annotated mechanism-of-action are useful in high throughput drug screening. Here, we have screened the SPECS library of drugs on five cell lines of interest Vero-E6, CACO-2, Calu-3, U2OS, HepG2 each originating from different tissues. Each compound has been tested in five concentrations with cell viability readout. The data has been analyzed with our novel SPECSPortal data analysis pipeline adapted from our previous Breeze analysis pipeline created for oncology drug profiling. The SPECSPortal examines in depth quality control statistics and generate drug quantification metrics such as drug sensitivity score (DSS), IC50/EC50, AUC etc. The SPECSPortal and the screening profiles will be made available as a web portal through the Swedish Covid-19 data portal. It will provide for interactive user interface which includes scatterplots, correlation plots, dose response curves, heatmaps where the user can filter drugs and cell lines to limit number of data points. The SPECSPortal is currently at beta stage and will be published soon.