About 30% of all respiratory tract infections are caused by coronaviruses, leading to widespread illnesses and, in some cases, to epidemic and even pandemic outbreaks, as we experienced with the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the development of groundbreaking technology that enables the design of prophylactic vaccines, access to those vaccines is not equal across the globe, especially in low-resource countries, and also other hesitations prevent their adoption.

In addition, coronavirus variants are emerging that can have higher infectivity and resistance to existing vaccines and antiviral treatments. Therefore, fast-acting antiviral drugs with broad activity against multiple respiratory coronaviruses and the ability to be rapidly distributed as oral treatments are urgently needed. In 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a multidisciplinary team of computational biologists, and infectious disease, medical chemistry and drug development experts formed at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

With early support from the Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA), the team, led by Wyss Founding Director Donald Ingber, M.D, Ph.D., sought to leverage the Wyss Institute’s existing computational and biological modeling capabilities to rapidly repurpose existing FDA-approved drugs for the fight against the disease. By creating a cohesive AI-enabled and physics-based molecular modeling and drug discovery pipeline built around film industry procedural animation software, they identified the orally available, FDA-approved drug bemcentinib, as a potential antiviral agent.

Source: https://wyss.harvard.edu/news/broad-spectrum-coronavirus-drug-developed-through-ai-enabled-dynamic-modeling/