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.