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Knowledge synthesis of 100 million biomedical documents augments the deep expression profiling of coronavirus receptors

May 28 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic demands assimilation of all biomedical knowledge to decode mechanisms of pathogenesis. Despite the recent renaissance in neural networks, a platform for the real-time synthesis of the exponentially growing biomedical literature and deep omics insights is unavailable. Here, we present the nferX platform for dynamic inference from 45 quadrillion+ possible conceptual associations from unstructured text and triangulation with insights from Single Cell RNA-sequencing, bulk RNAseq and proteomics from diverse tissue types. A hypothesis-free profiling of ACE2 suggests tongue keratinocytes, olfactory epithelial cells, airway club cells and respiratory ciliated cells as potential reservoirs of the SARS-CoV-2 receptor. We find the gut as the putative hotspot of COVID-19, where a maturation correlated transcriptional signature is shared in small intestine enterocytes among coronavirus receptors(ACE2, DPP4, ANPEP). A holistic data science platform triangulating insights from structured and unstructured data holds potential for accelerating the generation of impactful biological insights and hypotheses.

Authors:

AJ Venkatakrishnan, Arjun Puranik, Akash Anand, David Zemmour, Xiang Yao, Xiaoying Wu, Ramakrishna Chilaka, Dariusz K. Murakowski, Kristopher Standish, Bharathwaj Raghunathan, Tyler Wagner, Enrique Garcia-Rivera, Hugo Solomon, Abhinav Garg, Rakesh Barve, Anuli Anyanwu-Ofili, Najat Khan, Venky Soundararajan

nference, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA. nference Labs, Bengaluru, KA 560017, India. Janssen Research & Development LLC, USA. nference, Toronto, ON M5V 2G9, Canada.

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Correspondence to:

Venky Soundararajan (venky@nference.net)