Israeli scientists to participate in int'l drive to find COVID-curing pills

• Author: JERUSALEM POST STAFF
• Published date: 29 September 2021

The drive will be spearheaded by an initiative called "The COVID Moonshot," a non-profit, open-science consortium of scientists from around the world which started as a spontaneous virtual collaboration in March 2020, in which scientists from the Weizmann Institute are members.

Moonshot's over 150 scientists crowdsource ideas for molecular compounds, model them and evaluate them in-vitro against the virus. Their goal is to come up with a non-profit oral treatment for COVID-19 and related viral pandemics, especially for low- and middle-income countries.

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'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 and Moonshot participant 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 molecules for

future outbreaks. We also want to provide an open platform to accelerate the response time when new

pandemics arise,' London added.

Moonshot data is already available online to enable others to freely build on its work, and the project has already generated over 50%...