These projects are rapid sprints of relative alchemical free energy calculations for prioritizing compound designs from chemists from the COVID Moonshot for synthesis. Top-scoring molecules will be made and tested in a laboratory by the COVID Moonshot as it works to develop an open science patent-free inexpensive therapy for COVID-19 that shuts down the essential SARS-CoV-2 main viral protease.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnyaAmM1nhE
The COVID Moonshot has already made and tested hundreds of compounds, and is pursuing several good lead series. You can see their progress in real time here:
https://covid.postera.ai/covid/submissions/compounds
To learn more about what the Moonshot is and how it came about, you can read our blog post or watch this video.
In addition to helping us prioritize compounds, you can help us purchase more compounds for synthesis at cost from Enamine by sponsoring our GoFundMe page for patent-free open science COVID-19 drug discovery! This is a radical new approach to drug discovery that aims to rapidly produce inexpensive new therapies.
SARS-CoV-2 main viral potease (Mpro) with ligand bound, from the RCSB
This project is managed by at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
The Chodera lab combines expertise in theory, computation, and automated biophysical experiments to transform physics-based simulations into predictive models of drug binding, dynamics, and selectivity for the design of anticancer therapeutics.