Creation of a rapid in-silico predictive screening model targeting Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 to treat COVID-19

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At the time of initial application 15/April/2020, globally COVID-19 had infected over 1,914,916 people and killed over 123,010. Today, 22/October/2020, COVID-19 has infected over 41,104,946 and killed over 1,128,325. COVID-19 could wipe $4trillion from global economy and shrink UK economy triggering a 'big recession'. Epidemiologist prediction that a one-time lockdown will not be sufficient to bring the pandemic under control and that secondary peaks in autumn could be larger than the current one appear to be true and even now are suggesting strong possibility of a 3rd peak in winter. Fears by some authoritative medics and virologist that the "asymptomatic transmission is occurring", someone who has no symptoms from infection with virus, can still infect others, has proved to be the case. Although we have a much better understanding of the virus's behaviour and transmission rate. There is still no clear antiviral drug treatment strategy with proven efficacy nor are there vaccines for its prevention. As suggested in original application vaccines are taking much longer to develop and manufactured at doses to be of immediate benefit. The most likely way out of the pandemic is identification of a combination of small anti-(viral, infective, hypertensive), etc drugs that slows the virus to allow time for immune system to control it before it triggers pneumonia and cytokine storm. Every lost day in not having a treatment has a huge impact on lives lost, families involved, lost productivity as well as create a heavy economic burden. This project aims to help fast-forward the identification of drug treatments for COVID-19. Pharmidex already has comprehensive capabilities and facilities. Initial funding has enabled Pharmidex to recruit an in-silico postdoc expert to work towards establishing a rapid translational drug screening platform to identify and reposition potential combination therapies to treat COVID-19. The key objective of this proposal was to rapidly introduce in-silico prediction capability to the Pharmidex team which has been achieved timely. The project is innovative since only recently the 3D Map of SARS-CoV-2's Spike Protein part of virus that attaches to and infects human cells has been identified. The main area of focus as part of the “Extension for Impact” application will be to incorporate into our newly established in-silico model the recently identified/reported protein structures/targets of SARS-CoV-2. Utilise these new in-silico models in tandem with a database of known drugs to identify/select more efficacious putative drug candidates', using a drug repositioning approach.