From fragments to leads…
At the start of the pandemic a team at Oxford University crystallised and performed a fragment screen in record time before the first lockdown started. They then posted the results on-line, thinking maybe they would get a bit of input from the global chemistry community. The outcome was a tidal wave of ideas and thoughts. MedChemica’s Ed Griffen joining the project and took on a leading role in the medicinal chemistry effort. Today a first journal article is published, summarising the progress so far to find small molecule inhibitors. The weak hits have progressed into lead like compounds – a huge success for everyone involved.
COVID Moonshot: Open Science Discovery of SARS-CoV-2 Main Protease Inhibitors by Combining Crowdsourcing, High-Throughput Experiments, Computational Simulations, and Machine Learning
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.10.29.339317
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