UDCA May Promote COVID-19 Recovery: A Cohort Study with AI-Aided Analysis

To investigate the impact of ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA) treatment on the clinical outcome of mild and moderate COVID-19 cases, a retrospective analysis was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of UDCA on patients diagnosed with COVID-19 during the peak of the Omicron outbreak in China. This study presents promising results, demonstrating that UDCA significantly reduced the time to Body Temperature Recovery after admission and a higher daily dose seems to be associated with a better outcome without observed safety concerns. We also introduced VirtualBody, a physiologically plausible artificial neural network model, to generate an accurate depiction of the drug concentration-time curve individually, which represented the absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion of UDCA in each patient. It exhibits exceptional performance in modeling the complex PK-PD profile of UDCA, characterized by its endogenous and enterohepatic cycling properties, and further validates the effectiveness of UDCA as a treatment option from the drug exposure-response perspective. Our work highlights the potential of UDCA as a novel treatment option for periodic outbreaks of COVID-19 and introduces a new paradigm for PK-PD analysis in retrospective studies to provide evidence for optimal dosing strategies.