Innoplexus AG, a global AI-based platform for drug discovery and development, has revealed certain first results in its artificial intelligence enabled search for a COVID-19 antiviral treatment, it was reported on Thursday.

The company identified Hydroxychloroquine as a potential and immediately available treatment cost-effective option based on scanning data on earlier approved drugs for off-label potential in treating COVID-19, using its proprietary artificial intelligence and big data platform to generate actionable insights from hundreds of terabytes of structured and unstructured public data, drawing from sources ranging from private research databases to social media.

The findings reveal that a combination of Hydroxychloroquine or Chloroquine with several earlier approved drugs are likely to yield better results than any drug administered alone. This hypothesis needs to be further assessed in in-vitro and in-vivo research. The company's AI-based analysis investigated a combination of Chloroquine and Tocilizumab, a drug approved to treat severe rheumatoid arthritis. Tocilizumab is thought to interrupt the process of 'cytokine release syndrome' a form of serious inflammatory response that can occur as a complication of COVID-19. This first algorithm-based AI analysis of the data ocean also suggested that Chloroquine along with Remdesivir, an antiviral drug developed by Gilead to treat Ebola, is also likely to be effective. However, Remdesivir has not been approved yet for any indication and some first study results of Remdesivir alone showed limited efficacy. Hydroxychloroquine integrated with Clarithromycin or Plerixafor, a semisynthetic macrolide antibiotic derived from erythromycin and an antiretroviral for HIV respectively, is likely to be an option to be assessed further.