On Wednesday 18th May the NIH announced that the team that led the COVID Moonshot, including ourselves at MedChemica, along with additional collaborators has been awarded an initial $68 million to discover and develop globally accessible and affordable novel oral antivirals to combat COVID-19 and future pandemics caused by RNA viruses. The award is for
The Covid Moonshot project, to find a novel drug treatment for Covid-19s received a huge boost today of £8 million of support funding from the WellcomeTrust, on behalf of the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator. The grant will aid the project to continue its work, driving to the clinic to find an effective, cheap and available drug.
Leading the Medicinal Chemistry on the COVID Moonshot: A refelection by Dr Ed Griffen Back at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic we were invited to join the COVID Moonshot project. It’s a self starting open science academic-industrial collaboration. The foundation was rapid fragment screening at the Diamond facility in Oxford, biochemistry from the Weizmann
The rise and rise of protein degradation: Opportunities and challenges ahead Ian Churcher and colleagues, Amphista Therapeutics Ltd, Drug Discovery Today 20 August 2021, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drudis.2021.08.006 Targeted protein degradation(TBD) has been one of the emerging approaches of the early 21st century particularly as unlike downregulation approaches which have the same conceptual advantage of reducing the amount
Artificial intelligence in drug discovery: what is realistic, what are illusions? Part 1: Ways to make an impact, and why we are not there yet Drug Discovery Today. 2021, 26, 2, 511-524 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drudis.2020.12.009 Artificial intelligence (AI) is having a moment in the limelight, but what does this mean in the field of drug discovery? In
Welcome back to Bucket List Papers Sometime ago we started regularly posting what we think are the 100 must read papers computational and medicinal chemistry papers. This was the “Bucket list”, which was updated at a rate of two papers a week until we got too busy last year. So apologies for the gap of
Managing Director Dr Al Dossetter talks about 9 years in business and launching our e-newsletter... Where did nine years go? I am not going to describe ‘how we built the company?’, but more of where did that last 9 years go and what did we learn? It seems like a blur looking back and the
Open source Drug Discovery https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01571-1 From the start of Covid Moonshot the team made all of the research data publicly available. This is a rare thing in life sciences, where protection of intellectual property is key to eventual returns on investment. During the first lockdown, and subsequent research efforts, this yielded a huge response from
Additional methods of presenting the results. For RuleDesign(R) we have added two addition methods of looking at the suggest molecules: A lightweight view: So it is possible to view the results in browser and sort on just one of the data types that led to the suggestion being made. In the above example it is
The MyPairs system with Permutative Matched Molecular Pair Analysis This year's release of MCPairs includes a new suite of tools for Matched Molecular Pair Analysis (MMPA). We were asked to expand our large scale database processing capability to allow smaller scale input files to be uploaded, processed on their own and returned to the user.
