Alpha Lee, COVID Moonshot – Open Science Discovery of SARS-CoV-2 Mpro Inhibitors with Machine Learning and Crowdsourcing

Alpha Lee, University of Cambridge.
March 16, 2021. 3:35 – 4:50 pm.
A Joint Virtual Seminar with IIT’s Chemistry Colloquium on Zoom.

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 machine learning technologies have accelerated our design-make-test cycle, and the learnings we gleaned from this large-scale prospective use of algorithms.   

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