Exscientia receives $1.5 million Gates grant for Covid-19 therapy
pharmafile | July 8, 2021 | News story | |
The Oxford-based drugs firm Exscientia has won a $1.5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create a Covid-19 treatment that also works for new mutations or other SARS viruses.
Exscientia will utilise its artificial intelligence (AI) drug design platform to optimise the novel small molecule inhibitors into a therapeutic development candidate, designed to be active against SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses.
The project’s goal is to identify potential pan-coronavirus therapeutics that could be effective against COVID-19, and also new mutations or other SARS viruses that may emerge.
Under the new grant, Exscientia will receive $1.5 million which will be used to advance a development candidate on achieving defined milestones.
The virus protease inhibitors will be designed using Exscientia’s AI-driven drug discovery platform, which delivers optimised compounds, fulfilling complex design goals faster and more effectively than with conventional drug discovery methods.
As reported in The Guardian, Dr Denise Barrault, a Biologist and Senior Portfolio Manager at Exscientia, who set up the new project and will manage it, said the firm was aiming for a low-cost pill that could be distributed globally and given quickly to people who fall ill with COVID to ward off serious illness and hospitalisation.
Dr Barrault said: “People who get COVID really need to be treated immediately. They would be administered with the pill and the disease would be far less severe and people would avoid having to go to hospital … We can’t vaccinate everybody and vaccines will lose their effectiveness – only the richest countries will be able to keep up.
“The danger of new emerging strains and mutations of coronavirus means there is an urgent need for new antiviral drugs in this pandemic alongside vaccines, to respond more quickly in potential future coronavirus pandemics.
“We believe that the world needs innovation to accelerate the discovery of more effective counter-measures for a range of infectious diseases, including COVID-19.”
This testing stage of drug development typically takes four to five years but artificial intelligence can speed it up considerably.
The new grant is provided by the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, an initiative by the Gates Foundation, Wellcome and Mastercard aimed at speeding up the response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Lilly Subbotin
