Global Initiative to Rapidly Develop a Safe, Globally Accessible and Affordable COVID-19 Antiviral Pill

The world's largest open-science drug discovery effort, COVID Moonshot, has recently received key funding of £8 million from biomedical funding charity, Wellcome, on behalf of the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator. The global non-profit is dedicated to the discovery of globally affordable and easily-manufactured antiviral drugs against COVID-19 and future viral pandemics.

"Faced with global vaccine inequality and the rapid spread of variants of concern, the need for easily-accessible antiviral therapeutics to treat people with COVID-19 is as pressing as ever, especially in low- and middle-income countries," said Dr. Annette von Delft, Translational Scientist at the University of Oxford and NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre.

"Most of the research and funding efforts early in the pandemic focused predominantly on repurposing of existing small molecule drugs and the more rapid development of novel monoclonal antibodies. Now, with the realization that COVID-19 will be a global issue for the foreseeable future we urgently need to develop novel antiviral therapeutics. We are therefore thrilled to receive this critical funding from Wellcome and hope it can lead to more support," said Dr. Alpha Lee, Chief Scientific Officer at PostEra and Faculty Member at the University of Cambridge.

The Moonshot started as a spontaneous virtual collaboration in March 2020. As countries locked down, a group of scientists, academics, pharmaceutical research teams and students began a worldwide, twitter-fuelled race against the clock to identify new molecules that could block SARS-CoV-2 infection and develop pills that would be readily available to the most vulnerable communities.

Ultimately more than 150 scientists – including dozens of students who put their own projects on hold – joined Moonshot to crowdsource ideas for molecular compounds, model them and evaluate them in-vitro against the virus. Their goal: a safe, globally affordable, not-for-profit oral treatment for COVID-19 and related viral pandemics.

"Open drug discovery efforts are invariably super slow – ours, however, has been an express train on tracks we have had to lay down as we go," wrote Prof. Frank von Delft, Professor of Structural Chemical Biology at the University of Oxford and Principal Beamline Scientist at Diamond Light Source, the UK's national synchrotron science facility, in a Comment published in June in Nature. ‘It is a way of working none of us realized was possible.’

""Open drug discovery efforts are invariably super slow – ours, however, has been an express train on tracks we have had to lay down as we go"

Collaborators of the Moonshot project include academic and industrial groups such as Diamond Light Source (UK); the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel); the Nuffield Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford (UK); PostEra (US/UK); the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (US); various drug discovery consultants including MedChemica Ltd (UK), Thames Pharma Partners (US), and Compass Business Partners (UK); and the non-profit research and development organization Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (Switzerland), which is now taking the lead in coordinating the Wellcome-funded drive towards the clinic.

Thanks to this unprecedented collaboration, rapid progress was made and the team now aims to identify pre-clinical candidate molecules by end of 2021 – compounds that will be simple to manufacture in the form of pills and which will exert an antiviral effect via potent inhibition of the main protease (MPro) of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The project now enters the more capital-intensive phase: tweaking, optimizing and testing these molecules to develop them into a safe treatment. The financial support from Wellcome will be key in this process.

"From its inception, this project has focused on the needs of low- and middle-income countries and the most vulnerable communities, by striving to identify drugs that remove the need of cold chain or injection, and by ensuring that the results are equitably accessible," said Dr. Ben Perry, Discovery Open Innovation Leader at DNDi. "The project is based firmly in an open science environment and prioritized simplicity of synthesis of the future drugs, in order to facilitate manufacturing by any interested producer."

"If drug discovery efforts that were launched during the 2003 SARS epidemic had persevered and had been funded to completion, relevant anti-coronavirus drugs would have been more readily available when COVID-19 hit," said Dr. Nir London, Senior Scientist from the Weizmann Institute’s Department of Chemical and Structural Biology.

London, key contributor to Moonshot and one of its earliest members, adds: ‘Now is the time to plan for the future. In addition to addressing this current pandemic, which is not showing signs of slowing, we want to develop one or more novel pan-coronavirus antiviral molecule for future outbreaks. We also want to provide an open platform to accelerate the response time when new pandemics arise.”

All the generated discovery scientific data and the general learnings of the project will be put in the public domain. Moonshot data is already available online to enable others to freely build on its work – the project has already generated over 50% of known structural information on the main protease, a key protein in SARS-CoV-2. The first clinical trials are expected in 2022.