We characterized the expression profile of post-mortem human spleen samples by Ion AmpliSeq from dengue haemorrhagic fever and non-diseased deceased individuals, to enrich published gene expression profiles from blood and liver in Dengue cohorts.. Multi-tissue transcriptomic-informed in silico investigation of drugs for the treatment of dengue fever disease

Transcriptomics, proteomics and pathogen-host interactomics data is being explored for in silico informed-selection of drugs, prior to its functional evaluation. The effectiveness of this kind of strategy has been put into test in the current COVID-19 pandemic, and it has been paying off, leading to a few drugs being rapidly repurposed as treatment against SARS-CoV-2 infection. Several neglected tropical diseases, for which treatment remains unavailable, would benefit from informed in silico investigations of drugs, as we tried to perform in this work for dengue fever disease. We analysed transcriptomic data in the key tissues of liver, spleen and blood profiles, and verified that despite transcriptomic differences due to tissue specialization, the common mechanisms of action “Adrenergic receptor antagonist”, “ATPase inhibitor”, “NF-kB pathway inhibitor” and “Serotonin receptor antagonist” were identified as druggable (e.g. oxprenolol, digoxin, auranofin and palonosetron, respectively) to oppose the effects of severe dengue infection in these tissues. These are good candidates for future functional evaluation and clinical trials.