INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE:

Open science operates under the principle that any scientific result should be shared immediately, without restrictions on its use. Some say open science won't work for drug development, because it removes the financial incentives: Without the promise of patent protections, they believe, no one will assume the costs and risks to discover and develop new drugs. We disagree.

In March 2020, we started COVID Moonshot, which we believe is the first open-science effort to develop an antiviral drug. Now we are close to bringing an oral antiviral that's effective against SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid-19) to the clinic, with no patent protection. As soon as the drug is approved, any drug manufacturer around the world can manufacture and sell it without needing to license it, thus driving prices down.

This shouldn't be a one-time thing: We believe open-science drug discovery against current and future pandemics is an essential public service -- one that should be completely funded by governments for the benefit of their people.

The idea started with a tweet. Early in the pandemic, structural biologist Martin Walsh posted a 3D structure of one of the main proteins SARS-CoV-2 requires to replicate. We knew this protein was an attractive drug target because it doesn't easily mutate, which can render a drug less effective. (In contrast, the coronavirus spike protein targeted by vaccines and therapeutic antibodies is more likely to acquire mutations.) The protein, called Mpro, is also present in other disease-causing coronaviruses, suggesting that any antiviral drug targeting Mpro has a good chance of being effective against future coronavirus pandemics.

Since time was of the essence, we decided to approach drug discovery in an entirely different way -- by putting all our work online and asking the international scientific community to contribute. Ideas started streaming in right away, and scientists around the world have submitted more than 17,000 potential drug candidates targeting Mpro, each building on the ideas and data generated by others.

We have synthesized and tested more than 1,400 of these designs, using a network of collaborating labs including the Weizmann Institute of Science, the University of Oxford and Diamond Light Source. We also partnered with pharmaceutical companies (UCB, Boehringer Ingelheim), contract research organizations (Enamine, Sai Life Sciences), computing networks (Folding@home) and charities (DNDi and LifeArc) that donate labor and resources. This is a grassroots movement -- our whole drug discovery process is based on crowdsourcing ideas, experiments and support from the scientific community.

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