A team led by Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute’s Dr. Artem Cherkasov has screened 40 billion small molecule compounds in 19 days, seeking to find potential drugs to treat COVID-19.
An article published this month in Chemical Sciences that includes LSI’s Dr. Natalie Strynadka (Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology) and Dr. François Jean (Department of Microbiology and Immunology) among the senior authors has identified seven candidate drugs that will be moved forward into pre-clinical testing. The goal, Dr. Cherkasov told a reporter from the Vancouver Sun, “is to have an antiviral compound ready sometime next year.”
The computer-aided drug discovery software utilized in the study is called Deep Docking, a machine learning approach that built on softward Cherkasov has been working with for more than 20 years.
Read the Vancouver Sun interview