In this videoconference presentation, Dr. Nir London of the Weizmann Institute’s Department of Organic Chemistry describes what he calls the “COVID Moonshot.” The project is co-led by Frank van Delft of Oxford University and Diamond Light Source (the U.K.’s synchrotron science facility), who was also on the call. Dr. London discusses various approaches to coronavirus, including the value of standard approaches such as vaccines and antivirals.
Dr. London says that the team’s goal is open science. They will remove all the barriers of traditional drug discovery, freeing the research from bureaucracy and the search for wealth. As the science is crowdsourced, the results advance at a rate that no single lab could produce.