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Speaker: Dr Alpha Lee, Winton Advanced Research Fellow, Department of Physics, Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge
Host: Franca Fraternali
COVID Moonshot is an international consortium aiming to discover patent-free oral antiviral against SARS-CoV-2, targeting the main protease. Operating under an open science ethos, we make all data and structures publicly available, and crowdsource molecule designs from the community. In less than a year, we went from fragment hits to nanomolar leads in biochemical and antiviral assays. In my talk, I will discuss Moonshot’s journey towards orally bioavailable, non-covalent, and non-peptidomimetic Mpro inhibitors. I will discuss how physics-guided machine learning technologies have accelerated our design-make-test cycle, from integrating structural biology into molecular design to medicinal chemistry. I will also summarise the learnings we gleaned from this large-scale prospective use of computational techniques.