COVID Moonshot is a non-profit, open-science, global collective of scientists committed to discovering safe, affordable and easy-to-manufacture antiviral drugs against COVID-19 and future viral pandemics. It’s now homed by the ASAP platform, which uses artificial intelligence and structural-based design to quickly identify and optimise small molecule compounds that can disrupt viral replication.
As a result of these projects, scientists were able to create the first coronavirus antiviral developed through crowdsourcing and open-science. It has been designed to be a direct-to-generic, globally accessible treatment ready for future coronavirus pandemics.
After an independent expert review, DNDi has formally nominated the broad-spectrum pan-coronavirus antiviral ASAP-0017445 as a pre-clinical drug candidate.
The antiviral is a main protease inhibitor that shows promising activity against SARS-Cov2 and other viruses of the same family. This also includes other viruses of pandemic potential such as MERS-CoV, hence its ‘broad-spectrum’ qualification.
Dr Annette von Delft, Head of Anti-Infectives at the Centre for Medicines Discovery in the Nuffield Department of Medicine and partner of the Moonshot initiative, said: ‘Our goal is to deliver an effective and affordable antiviral medicine that would be accessible to everyone if and when the next coronavirus pandemic strikes. Antivirals have shown to be extremely effective in reducing risk of hospitalisation and deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic, but there were serious issues around access to the drugs in low- and middle-income countries. Humanity must not repeat the same mistakes. From the outset, our antiviral has been designed to directly become a generic, so it can save as many lives as possible.’
The next step is to synthesise the pre-clinical candidate in quantities sufficient for testing in preparation for Phase I clinical trials.
Peter Sjö, Head of the Drug Discovery Programme at DNDi, said: ‘The cost of developing an antiviral today is extremely low compared to what we might lose if we are not prepared when the next pandemic hits. Fundamentally there is a lack of potent, broad-spectrum coronavirus antivirals ready to be deployed in a future pandemic. Here we have a promising agent; it is almost ready to be tested in humans, is royalty-free, and could become a generic treatment. We are calling on potential donors to join and support the clinical development of medicines to protect people from new pandemic threats.’
The backbone of ASAP-0017445 molecule was initially designed with the input from hundreds of researchers around the world who, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, spontaneously joined efforts to develop a new, affordable and globally accessible antiviral. They submitted more than 18,000 designs for a molecule that could inhibit the main protease of SARS-CoV2, before being further developed by Covid Moonshot and ASAP.
The structure of ASAP-0017445 was publicly disclosed in March 2025. All the data generated during its development, including the structure data of the more than 2,000 compounds submitted during the crowdsourcing phase, are publicly available. Other researchers can build on this unprecedented dataset for drug discovery for their own research.