Japanese Supercomputer 'Fugaku' Discovers Dozens of Candidate Drugs for COVID-19 Treatment

The supercomputer 'Fugaku' owned by the Computational Science Research Center at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Kobe City, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan.
[Image source=Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Lee Chun-hee] Japan's supercomputer, which boasts world-class computational speed, has succeeded in identifying numerous candidate drugs for treating COVID-19, local media reported on the 4th.

According to the report, Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and Kyoto University announced the day before that they successfully discovered dozens of candidate substances for COVID-19 treatment using the supercomputer "Fugaku."

The two institutions reported that these candidate drugs inhibit the replication of the COVID-19 virus within cells, and they plan to collaborate with pharmaceutical companies to explore clinical trial options.

The research team led by Professor Okuno Yasushi of Kyoto University, who is also the deputy program director at AIST, collected a total of 2,128 drugs, including existing antiviral and anticancer drugs. They used Fugaku to calculate and predict whether these substances could bind to proteins involved in viral replication and block the replication process, revealing that dozens of drugs showed promise as treatments.

The team explained that among the candidate drugs identified by Fugaku, 12 used as antiparasitic agents are already being administered to COVID-19 patients in the United States and Mexico to verify their effectiveness.

Fugaku is a supercomputer jointly developed by AIST and electronics company Fujitsu. It ranked first in the global supercomputer computational speed rankings announced on the 22nd of last month. Fugaku's computational power is 41.6 quadrillion calculations per second, which is 2.8 times that of the United States' Summit, ranked second, with 14.9 quadrillion calculations per second.