Covid-19 coronavirus [image by Laurence Pearl, Professor of Structural Biology]

A chemist at the University of Sussex has joined over 100 researchers to detail the next steps towards a Covid-19 antiviral drug.

Professor John Spencer is co-author of the international paper, joining collaborators from academia and industry.

The paper, recently published in the journal BioRx, details research which focusses on the development of SARS-CoV-2 main protease (Mpro) inhibitors, which might lead to an effective drug in the treatment of Covid-19.

John Spencer, Professor of Chemistry, said: “I’m delighted to be a part of this truly international effort which has led to the design of molecules with antiviral activity comparable to that of Remdesivir (a broad-spectrum antiviral medication).

“Covid Moonshot is an extraordinary open access, IP-free endeavour, involving crowd-sourced chemistry, machine learning, structural biology, fragment-based drug discovery. I’m very grateful to our funders, without which my lab’s contributions would not be possible.”

The COVID Moonshot project has seen scientists working in universities and industry across the world join forces to crowdsource designs for the drug, in the hope of shortcutting a process that would usually take years.

Professor Spencer, a medicinal chemist with 10 years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry, had submitted around 100 ideas to the project, offering advice and sending compounds from the Spencer Lab at the University of Sussex for testing.

Funding from HEIF Covid Emergency Funds, the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), LabFact (Interreg V Programme) and ISSF (Wellcome Trust) contributed to Professor Spencer’s involvement.

COVID Moonshot: Open Science Discovery of SARS-CoV-2 Main Protease Inhibitors by Combining Crowdsourcing, High-Throughput Experiments, Computational Simulations, and Machine Learning is published in BioRx. The research has not yet been peer reviewed but the prepublication is available and can be freely accessed: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.29.339317v1