Spearheading antiviral discovery with AI and open innovation

It began with a tweet.

On 9 March 2020, myself and my co-founders Matthew Robinson and Aaron Morris were living out of an Airbnb in Silicon Valley. We were starting PostEra, an AI-driven biotech. The tweet came from Martin Walsh, a scientist from Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire, UK. His team solved the crystal structure of the Sars-CoV-2 main protease, a key viral protein, with many small molecule fragments bound to the active site. Each of these fragments are weak binders, but we thought our AI algorithms could build potent antivirals by merging them. But we also wanted to also tap into the community of scientists around the world.

We launched Covid Moonshot, also via a tweet.

We asked the scientific community to design compounds based on merging fragments and submit them to our online crowdsourcing portal. We also made a commitment that all data and structures will be released real-time to immediately benefit the antiviral community: open science without staking any IP claims.