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A community effort in SARS‐CoV‐2 drug discovery

Published on - Molecular Informatics

Authors: Johannes Schimunek, Philipp Seidl, Katarina Elez, Tim Hempel, Tuan Le, Frank Noé, Simon Olsson, Lluís Raich, Robin Winter, Hatice Gokcan, Filipp Gusev, Evgeny Gutkin, Olexandr Isayev, Maria Kurnikova, Chamali Narangoda, Roman Zubatyuk, Ivan Bosko, Konstantin Furs, Anna Karpenko, Yury Kornoushenko, Mikita Shuldau, Artsemi Yushkevich, Mohammed Benabderrahmane, Patrick Bousquet-Melou, Ronan Bureau, Beatrice Charton, Bertrand Cirou, Gérard Gil, William Allen, Suman Sirimulla, Stanley Watowich, Nick Antonopoulos, Nikolaos Epitropakis, Agamemnon Krasoulis, Vassilis Pitsikalis, Stavros Theodorakis, Igor Kozlovskii, Anton Maliutin, Alexander Medvedev, Petr Popov, Mark Zaretckii, Hamid Eghbal-Zadeh, Christina Halmich, Sepp Hochreiter, Andreas Mayr, Peter Ruch, Michael Widrich, Francois Berenger, Ashutosh Kumar, Yoshihiro Yamanishi, Kam Zhang, Emmanuel Bengio, Yoshua Bengio, Moksh Jain, Maksym Korablyov, Cheng-Hao Liu, Marcous Gilles, Enrico Glaab, Kelly Barnsley, Suhasini Iyengar, Mary Jo Ondrechen, V. Joachim Haupt, Florian Kaiser, Michael Schroeder, Luisa Pugliese, Simone Albani, Christina Athanasiou, Andrea Beccari, Paolo Carloni, Giulia d'Arrigo, Eleonora Gianquinto, Jonas Goßen, Anton Hanke, Benjamin Joseph, Daria Kokh, Sandra Kovachka, Candida Manelfi, Goutam Mukherjee, Abraham Muñiz-Chicharro, Francesco Musiani, Ariane Nunes-Alves, Giulia Paiardi, Giulia Rossetti, S. Kashif Sadiq, Francesca Spyrakis, Carmine Talarico, Alexandros Tsengenes, Rebecca Wade, Conner Copeland, Jeremiah Gaiser, Daniel Olson, Amitava Roy, Vishwesh Venkatraman, Travis Wheeler, Haribabu Arthanari, Klara Blaschitz, Marco Cespugli, Vedat Durmaz, Konstantin Fackeldey, Patrick Fischer, Christoph Gorgulla, Christian Gruber, Karl Gruber, Michael Hetmann, Jamie Kinney, Krishna Das, Shreya Pandita, Amit Singh, Georg Steinkellner, Guilhem Tesseyre, Gerhard Wagner, Zi-Fu Wang, Ryan Yust, Dmitry Druzhilovskiy, Dmitry Filimonov, Pavel Pogodin, Vladimir Poroikov, Anastassia Rudik, Leonid Stolbov, Alexander Veselovsky, Maria de Rosa, Giada De Simone, Maria Gulotta, Jessica Lombino, Nedra Mekni, Ugo Perricone, Arturo Casini, Amanda Embree, D. Benjamin Gordon, David Lei, Katelin Pratt, Christopher Voigt, Kuang-Yu Chen, Yves Jacob, Tim Krischuns, Pierre Lafaye, Agnès Zettor, M. Luis Rodríguez, Kris White, Daren Fearon, Frank von Delft, Martin Walsh, Dragos Horvath, Charles Brooks, Babak Falsafi, Bryan Ford, Adolfo García-Sastre, Sang Yup Lee, Nadia Naffakh, Alexandre Varnek, Guenter Klambauer, Thomas Hermans

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The COVID‐19 pandemic continues to pose a substantial threat to human lives and is likely to do so for years to come. Despite the availability of vaccines, searching for efficient small‐molecule drugs that are widely available, including in low‐ and middle‐income countries, is an ongoing challenge. In this work, we report the results of an open science community effort, the “Billion molecules against Covid‐19 challenge”, to identify small‐molecule inhibitors against SARS‐CoV‐2 or relevant human receptors. Participating teams used a wide variety of computational methods to screen a minimum of 1 billion virtual molecules against 6 protein targets. Overall, 31 teams participated, and they suggested a total of 639,024 molecules, which were subsequently ranked to find ‘consensus compounds’. The organizing team coordinated with various contract research organizations (CROs) and collaborating institutions to synthesize and test 878 compounds for biological activity against proteases (Nsp5, Nsp3, TMPRSS2), nucleocapsid N, RdRP (only the Nsp12 domain), and (alpha) spike protein S. Overall, 27 compounds with weak inhibition/binding were experimentally identified by binding‐, cleavage‐, and/or viral suppression assays and are presented here. Open science approaches such as the one presented here contribute to the knowledge base of future drug discovery efforts in finding better SARS‐CoV‐2 treatments.