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Crowdsourcing drug discovery for pandemics

Nature Chemistry volume 12, page 581 (2020)Cite this article

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To the Editor — In 2002 and 2003 the SARS-CoV pandemic paralysed the Far East1. However, drug discovery efforts into the virus largely halted after the crisis subsided. The COVID-19 pandemic might have been avoided if those efforts against SARS-CoV had persisted. Despite many warnings, we have not made headway in anti-infective medicines more generally. Relying on commercial promise has clearly not worked: even after discovering a novel antibiotic and taking it to market, the antibiotics-focused company Achaogen collapsed due to lack of market incentives2. A new approach is needed for pandemic preparedness, in which society’s investment in health is decoupled from commercial interests. Our initiative — the COVID Moonshot (https://postera.ai/covid) — is trying to implement such a solution.

Our approach is a non-profit, open-science drug-discovery model. COVID Moonshot is an international consortium of scientists drawn from academia, biotechs, contract research organizations (CROs) and pharma, all working pro bono or at cost with funding generated from crowdfunding (https://www.gofundme.com/f/covidmoonshot), philanthropy and bootstrapped grants. Unencumbered by intellectual property concerns, it aims to rapidly develop easily manufacturable antiviral drugs that can inhibit the SARS-CoV-2 main protease. All data and structures are made publicly available.

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References

  1. Peiris, J. S. M., Yuen, K. Y., Osterhaus, A. D. M. E. & Stöhr, K. N. Engl. J. Med. 349, 2431–2441 (2003).

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  2. Farrar, J. We ignore the disaster in the antibiotics market at our peril. Financial Times (21 April 2019).

  3. Douangamath, A. et al. Preprint at https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.05.27.118117 (2020).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computational and Systems Biology Program, Sloan Kettering Institute, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA

    John Chodera

  2. Department of Physics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Alpha A. Lee

  3. PostEra Inc., 2 Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Alpha A. Lee

  4. Department of Organic Chemistry, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

    Nir London

  5. Diamond Light Source Ltd., Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, Didcot, UK

    Frank von Delft

  6. Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Frank von Delft

  7. Department of Biochemistry, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Frank von Delft

Authors
  1. John Chodera
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  2. Alpha A. Lee
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  3. Nir London
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  4. Frank von Delft
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to John Chodera, Alpha A. Lee, Nir London or Frank von Delft.

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Competing interests

J.D.C is a current member of the Scientific Advisory Board of OpenEye Scientific Software and a scientific consultant for Foresite Labs. The Chodera laboratory receives or has received funding from multiple sources, including the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, Relay Therapeutics, Entasis Therapeutics, Silicon Therapeutics, EMD Serono (Merck KGaA), AstraZeneca, Vir Biotechnology, Bayer, XtalPi, the Molecular Sciences Software Institute, the Starr Cancer Consortium, the Open Force Field Consortium, Cycle for Survival, a Louis V. Gerstner Young Investigator Award, and the Sloan Kettering Institute. A complete funding history for the Chodera lab can be found at http://choderalab.org/funding. A.A.L is the chief scientific officer and a shareholder of PostEra Inc. The Lee laboratory at the University of Cambridge receives funding from multiple sources, including Pfizer, AstraZeneca, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability. N.L. is a member of the scientific advisory board of Trilogy Sciences. FvD is a member of the SGC. The SGC is a charity (no. 1097737) funded by AbbVie, Bayer Pharma AG, Boehringer Ingelheim, Canada Foundation for Innovation, Eshelman Institute for Innovation, Genome Canada, Innovative Medicines Initiative (EU/ EFPIA) [ULTRA-DD grant no. 115766], Janssen, Merck KGaA Darmstadt, MSD, Novartis Pharma AG, Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation, Pfizer, Sao Paulo Research Foundation-FAPESP, Takeda, and Wellcome [grant no. 106169/ZZ14/Z].

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Chodera, J., Lee, A.A., London, N. et al. Crowdsourcing drug discovery for pandemics. Nat. Chem. 12, 581 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-020-0496-2

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