Exscientia, a London-based artificial intelligence (AI) driven drug discovery company, announced a joint initiative with Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron facility and Calibr, a division of Scripps Research (USA), to progress compounds that could rapidly become viable drugs for the rapid treatment of COVID-19. The initiative will screen nearly every known approved and investigational drug against key COVID-19 drug targets to progress compounds that could rapidly become viable drugs for the rapid treatment of the coronavirus.
Alliance Drives Rapid Screen Against Key Coronavirus Targets
Through this alliance, Exscientia has gained access to Calibr’s world’s leading collection of 15,000 clinically-ready molecules. This collection includes launched drugs, additional compounds that have already been shown to be safe in humans and promising compounds that have passed pre-clinical safety studies. The collection, which has been funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will be shipped from the Scripps Research in La Jolla, California to Exscientia, in Oxford, UK.
Exscientia will first apply its advanced biosensor platforms to rapidly screen the complete collection against key viral drug targets of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19. Three prioritized targets include; the 3CL protease, the NSP12-NSP7-NSP8 RNA polymerase complex (both of which are vital components for viral replication) and the virus’s SPIKE protein, which interacts with the human cell receptor ACE2 in order to gain entry to human cells.
Dr Martin Redhead, Head of Quantitative Pharmacology at Exscientia, who will carry out the analysis, commented: “Given the ever expanding scale and rapid speed at which COVID-19 is spreading, the initial priority is to search for any existing drug that can be repurposed to protect the human population. Then as we move forward we can design superior molecules with our AI-Design systems to work even more effectively against the virus. The Scripps Research collection allows us to explore both of these important objectives.
Why Drug Discovery to Vital to Combatting COVID-19
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Exscientia’s mission is to make safer, more sophisticated drugs available to all – more quickly and efficiently than ever before using it AI drug discovery platform. At this critical time globally, the company believes that a dual strategy to first identify opportunities in the existing set of known drugs and then work on new optimized molecules is an optimal path to start to protect the human population from this invasive disease.
Source: HIT Consultant
