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Artificial intelligence, drug repurposing and peer review

Can traditional computational analysis and machine learning help compensate for inadequate peer review of drug-repurposing papers in the context of an infodemic?

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Acknowledgements

T.I.O. was supported by the US National Institutes of Health, U24 CA224370. E.B. was supported by Krebsliga Schweiz, BIL KFS 4261-08-2017.

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Correspondence to Evelyne Bischof or Alex Zhavoronkov.

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Competing interests

J.M.L. works for Ovid Therapeutics, a public biotechnology company developing medicines for rare neurological diseases, and is the chairman of the Biotechnology Industry Organization. A.Z. and Q.V. are affiliated with Insilico Medicine, a company developing artificial intelligence solutions for target discovery, small molecule chemistry and prediction of clinical trial outcomes. A.Z. is the CEO of Deep Longevity, an artificial intelligence company. S.D. is CEO of SparkBeyond, an artificial intelligence company. T.C. is CEO of Owkin, an artificial intelligence company specializing in clinical research. T.I.O. has received honoraria from or consulted for Abbott, AstraZeneca, Chiron, Genentech, Infinity Pharmaceuticals, Merz Pharmaceuticals, Merck Darmstadt, Mitsubishi Tanabe, Novartis, Ono Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi, Wyeth and Insilico Medicine. J.P.O. was previously employed by Pfizer, Inpharmatica, EMBL-EBI and BenevolentAI, and has received honoraria or consulting fees from Insitro, Sanofi and Boehringer Ingelheim. C.R.C. is a founder and a director of Retrotope and an advisor to Insilico Medicine. E.B. is an advisor to Insilico Medicine.

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Levin, J.M., Oprea, T.I., Davidovich, S. et al. Artificial intelligence, drug repurposing and peer review. Nat Biotechnol 38, 1127–1131 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-020-0686-x

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