COVID Moonshot funded by COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator to rapidly develop a safe, globally accessible and affordable antiviral pill

Geneva / Oxford / New York / Tel Aviv — 27 Sep 2021

The COVID Moonshot, a non-profit, open-science consortium of scientists from around the world dedicated to the discovery of globally affordable and easily-manufactured antiviral drugs against COVID-19 and future viral pandemics has received key funding of £8 million from Wellcome, on behalf of the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator.

‘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 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 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.

COVID Moonshot collaborators (left to right): Ben Perry, Discovery Open Innovation Leader at DNDi; Frank von Delft, Professor of Structural Chemical Biology at the University of Oxford and Principal Beamline Scientist at Diamond Light Source; John Chodera, Associate Member at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and founding member of the Folding@home Consortium; Annette von Delft, Translational Scientist at the University of Oxford; Ed Griffen, Technical Director and Co-founder of MedChemica; Alpha Lee, Chief Scientific Officer at PostEra and Faculty Member at the University of Cambridge.

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

Collaborators of the Moonshot project include academic and industrial groups such as Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron; 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 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 anti-viral 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 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 Nir London, Senior Scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

‘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.

About DNDi

A non-profit research and development organization, the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) works to deliver new treatments for people living with neglected diseases, especially Chagas disease, sleeping sickness (human African trypanosomiasis), leishmaniasis, filarial infections, mycetoma, pediatric HIV, and hepatitis C. DNDi is also coordinating a clinical trial to find treatments for mild-to-moderate COVID-19 cases in Africa.

Since its creation in 2003 by Médecins Sans Frontières, DNDi has provided 9 new treatments, including new drug combinations for visceral leishmaniasis, two fixed-dose antimalarial drugs, and the first chemical entity it developed, fexinidazole, approved in 2018 for the treatment of both stages of sleeping sickness.

About Wellcome

Wellcome supports science to solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone. We support discovery research into life, health and wellbeing, and we’re taking on three worldwide health challenges: mental health, global heating and infectious diseases.

About the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator

The Therapeutics Accelerator is an initiative launched by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and Mastercard with support from public and philanthropic donors to speed up the response to the COVID-19 pandemic by identifying, assessing, developing, and scaling up treatments. Its partners are committed to equitable access, including making products available and affordable in low-resource settings.

About Diamond Light Source

Diamond Light Source provides industrial and academic user communities with access to state-of-the-art analytical tools to enable world-changing science. Shaped like a huge ring, it works like a giant microscope, accelerating electrons to near light speeds, to produce a light 10 billion times brighter than the Sun, which is then directed off into 33 laboratories known as ‘beamlines.’ Since operations started, more than 14,000 researchers from both academia and industry have used Diamond to conduct experiments, with the support of approximately 760 world-class staff. More than 10,000 scientific articles have been published by our users and scientists.

Funded by the UK Government through the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), and by the Wellcome Trust, Diamond is one of the most advanced scientific facilities in the world, and its pioneering capabilities are helping to keep the UK at the forefront of scientific research.

About PostEra

PostEra offers medicinal chemistry powered by machine learning. Our technology is built upon pioneering research done at the University of Cambridge. The technology addresses some of the key challenges in drug discovery R&D by integrating molecular design with chemical synthesis. PostEra partners with drug hunters to co-develop cures for patients while also offering some of its synthesis technology via its Manifold web platform. PostEra launched and now helps lead the world’s largest open-science drug discovery effort: COVID Moonshot.

About the University of Oxford and the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre

Oxford University is world-famous for research excellence and home to some of the most talented people from across the globe. Our work helps the lives of millions, solving real-world problems through a huge network of partnerships and collaborations. The NIHR Biomedical Research Centre, Oxford (OxBRC) is based at the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and run in partnership with the University of Oxford, and was one of five centres funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) in 2007. The OxBRC is a partnership that brings together the research expertise of the University of Oxford and the clinical skills of staff of Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust with the aim of supporting translational research and innovation to improve healthcare for patients.