What is the COVID Moonshot Project?

While some countries are gearing up to roll out COVID-19 booster shots, others are struggling to secure first-doses of the vaccine. This global imbalance hasn’t gone unnoticed, with the World Health Organisation (WHO) warning vaccine inequity isn’t just a threat to human life but also to global economic recovery. Without a balanced approach to worldwide vaccination, low and middle income countries will get left behind and a global economic recovery cannot take place.  

As part of a collaborative plan to scale up vaccine development and distribution, a consortium of scientists from around the world have founded a project called COVID Moonshot. The non-profit group is dedicated to discovering affordable and easy to manufacture antiviral drugs to treat COVID-19 as well as other viruses.

Health charities support vaccine equality efforts

Moonshot recently received a cash injection of £8 million from Wellcome, a London-based health research charitable foundation. The funds will be used to fast-track clinical development and help the Moonshot work towards vaccine equality.

“With the realisation that COVID-19 will be a global issue for the foreseeable future we urgently need to develop novel antiviral therapeutics. We are therefore thrilled to receive this critical funding from Wellcome and hope it can lead to more support,” said Alpha Lee, Chief Scientific Officer at PostEra and Faculty Member at the University of Cambridge.

British life science medical research charity LifeArc helped fund the early discovery work needed to launch Moonshot. The project is also relying on contributions from academic collaborators and crowd-sourcing campaigns, as well as pledges from pharmaceutical companies such as Takeda and Novartis.

Action unfolds at Diamond Light Source

A significant portion of the research is being carried out at Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron science facility in Oxfordshire. The facility offers state-of-the-art equipment that allows researchers to analyse how small chemical compounds bind to the proteins that drive viral infection and replication.

“Each protein or ‘drug target’ is produced in sufficient quantities to allow researchers to grow crystals that can be used to provide high resolution images using x-ray crystallography and the powerful x-rays generated by Diamond,” explains Frank von Delft, Principal Beamline Scientist at Diamond Light Source.

“This technique allows researchers to visualise where and how these fragments bind to the sars-cov-2 drug targets being analysed. These data then provide an accelerated platform to aid development of compounds as initial starting points for drug discovery,” adds von Delft, who also works as a Professor of Structural Chemical Biology at the University of Oxford. “This is a very early part of the drug design process and it’s been the first time the process has been very open to the whole research community.”

Want to know more about the Moonshot project? Don’t miss ‘Consortium focuses on drug solutions to fight Covid.’