Crowdsourcing initiative to find a drug against Covid-19

Scientist and expert from all over the world have come together in the Covid Moonshot project, to develop a compound to fight the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

In January 2020, scientist from China determined the structure of an enzime in the virus, essential for the virus to be able to replicate, that would make for an excellent drug target. On the following months, in the UK, scientist at Diamond Light Source started researching chemical fragments that would bind to the virus enzyme, potentially inactivating it.

When PostEra co-founder, Alpha Lee saw on Twitter that the experts at Diamond Light Source had identified more than 60 fragments, he knew that is company could help. PostEra is a startup that integrates molecular design with chemical synthesis, to speed up the process of drug discovery. So, they partnered and started the Covid Moonshot Project. They asked scientist and experts to go their website and help design possible drug candidates, by combining those fragments and turning them into functional molecular compounds.

In the website, they have already gathered more than 4500 design suggestions, “from a wide range of sources: grad students, professors, and medicinal chemists who have formerly helped bring drugs to market”, and the platform is still open for more submissions.

PostEra than analysis the compounds submitted to the platform and screens them select the most promising ones. They have already selected a list of 250 compounds that show potential and have partnered with Enamine, that will synthetize the compounds so they can be tested.

Most of the players involved are contributing their time and resources pro-bono, but the project has set up a crowdsourcing campaign to help subside the process of synthetizing and testing the most promising compounds. All aspects of the project are open source and the coordinating team has made a commitment that “ All intellectual property involving identities of compounds developed under this project will be made openly available in the public domain without patent or any other form of intellectual property restrictions”.

“In times like these, when the world is closing down, science should open up. We are really optimistic that we can get a viable [drug] candidate out of this effort” states Alpha Lee, one of the coordinators of the Project.

Adapted from: https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/postera-points-its-synthesis-algorit...
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/artificial-intelligence/medical-a...

Project Website: https://postera.ai/covid

More information:
https://discuss.postera.ai/t/covid-project-faq-about-us/72