Background: COVID-2019 pandemic lead to a raised interest on the development of new treatments through Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Aim: to carry out a systematic review on the development of repurposed drugs against COVID-2019 through the application of AI.
Methods: The Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) checklist was applied.
Keywords: ["Artificial intelligence" and (COVID or SARS) and (medicine or drug)]. Databases: PubMed®, DOAJ and SciELO. Cochrane Library was additionally screened to identify previous published reviews on the same topic.
Results: From the 277 identified records [PubMed® (n = 157); DOAJ (n = 119) and SciELO (n = 1)], 27 studies were included. Among other, the selected studies on new treatments against COVID-2019 were classified, as follows: studies with in-vitro and/or clinical data; association of known drugs; and other studies related to repurposing of drugs.
Conclusion: Diverse potentially repurposed drugs against COVID-2019 were identified. The repurposed drugs were mainly from antivirals, antibiotics, anticancer, anti-inflammatory, and Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) groups, although diverse other pharmacologic groups were covered. AI was a suitable tool to quickly analyze large amounts of data or to estimate drug repurposing against COVID-2019.
Keywords: COVID-2019; SARS-CoV-2; artificial intelligence; drug design; in silico methods; machine learning; medicines; molecular docking; molecular dynamics; repurposing of drugs.