3.1 Drug and vaccine repurposing workflow
To study BCG’s polypharmacology and potential beneficial effects of this
vaccine in preventing the fatal consequences of COVID-19, we have
devised and implemented a ‘network biology’ workflow (Figure 1) to
interrogate the hypothesis that BCG vaccination may protect from
COVID-19 fatalities. This workflow is based on our drug repurposing
chemocentric informatics workflow, which has been validated previously
for small-molecule drug repurposing. The current workflow is tweaked
towards vaccine repurposing by employing novel bioinformatic approaches
to computationally model and connect molecular networks in an effort to
understand the underlying ‘network’ biology of vaccines, and pinpoint
the regulatory genes and proteins responsible for causing the observed
beneficial multitherapeutic effects. Although we are not the first group
to use network biology approaches to study the transcriptional changes
of vaccines, to our knowledge, this is the first study that uses these
approaches to support vaccine repurposing, specifically for COVID-19.