As academics and companies the world over are racing to find a treatment for COVID-19, an Oxford-based artificial intelligence firm is going to screen more than 15,000 drugs for their effectiveness as a cure for the coronavirus.
Exscientia has teamed up with a UK national science facility for the purpose and has gained access to a large collection of existing drugs held by the Scripps research institute in California and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The firm will screen them in collaboration with Diamond Light Source near Oxford, which works like a giant microscope and generate bright light that allows scientists to study viruses. It has expressed the hope that it would discover a drug that can be repurposed to treat coronavirus within the next six to 12 months. The medicine would then be tested on COVID-19 patients .
The drug collection comprising more than 15,000 compounds approved and tested for human safety in clinical trials or pre-clinical studies, has been shipped from California to Oxford.
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Prof David Stuart, director of life sciences at Diamond and professor of structural biology at Oxford University said, “The drugs we are testing have either been approved by the [US regulator] FDA for other diseases or have been extensively tested for human safety. By being able to repurpose existing molecules, we can save a lot of time in the drug discovery process, meaning a faster route to clinical trials, and potentially a treatment for patients.”
The firms is using its biosensor technology to screen the drug molecules for effectiveness against Sars-Cov-2, which is responsible for the coronavirus. The project will focus on components for viral replication and the interaction between the virus’s spike protein and a human cell receptor that enables the virus’s entry to human cells.
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The firms hopes to have complete data sets within six to eight weeks. Then, drug molecules will be tested further to ascertain they work as a treatment for COVID-19.
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