A community effort in SARS‐CoV‐2 drug discovery
Johannes Schimunek, Philipp Seidl, Katarina Elez, Tim Hempel, Tuan Le, Frank Noé, Simon Olsson, Lluı́s Raich, Robin Winter, Hatice Gökcan, Filipp Gusev, Evgeny Gutkin, Olexandr Isayev, Maria G. Kurnikova, Chamali H. Narangoda, R.I. Zubatyuk, Ivan P. Bosko, Konstantin V. Furs, Anna D. Karpenko, Yury V. Kornoushenko, Mikita Shuldau, Artsemi Yushkevich, Mohammed Benabderrahmane, Patrick Bousquet‐Melou, Ronan Bureau, Beatrice Charton, Bertrand C. Cirou, Gérard Gil, William J. Allen, Suman Sirimulla, Stanley J. 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 Y. J. Zhang, Emmanuel Bengio, Yoshua Bengio, Moksh Jain, Maksym Korablyov, Chenghao Liu, Gilles Marcou, Enrico Glaab, Kelly K. Barnsley, Suhasini M. Iyengar, Mary Jo Ondrechen, V. Joachim Haupt, Florian Kaiser, Michael Schroeder, Luisa Pugliese, Simone Albani, Christina Athanasiou, Andrea R. Beccari, Paolo Carloni, Giulia D’Arrigo, Eleonora Gianquinto, Jonas Goßen, Anton Hanke, Benjamin P. Joseph, Daria B. 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 C. Wade, Conner Copeland, Jeremiah Gaiser, Daniel R. Olson, Amitava Roy, Vishwesh Venkatraman, Travis J. Wheeler, Haribabu Arthanari, Klara Blaschitz, Marco Cespugli, Vedat Durmaz, Konstantin Fackeldey, Patrick D. Fischer
Abstract
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.