In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, international scientists from academia and industry have pooled their expertise and resources to identify candidate compounds that inhibit the activity of the SARS-CoV-2 main protease, in order to develop a clinically effective antiviral.
The aptly named COVID-19 Moonshot aims to accomplish this task more rapidly than has historically been done by crowdsourcing potential inhibitors from chemists around that world. In the span of roughly three months, hundreds of scientists have submitted thousands of potential candidates that are now being screened and checked for viability.
All the data generated by the collective is shared publicly using a database supplied by Collaborative Drug Discovery. This includes the structures of the protease and the hits identified by screening experiments, as well as the experimental protocols used to select compounds for synthesis and testing.
