An open-science consortium fighting for accessible COVID-19 treatments has received £8 million from the Wellcome Trust, a London-based charitable foundation focused on health research. The group, COVID Moonshot, was born in the early days of global lockdown. At that time, an international cross-section of scientists, academics, pharmaceutical research teams, and students began a collaborative race to identify new molecules that could block SARS-CoV-2 infection and to develop pills ready to roll out to those most in need of affordable medicine.
Alpha Lee, of the University of Cambridge, noted that Moonshot’s early efforts – focused on repurposing existing small molecule drugs and rapidly developing monoclonal antibodies – have now shifted to developing new antiviral therapeutics in light of the likely persistence of COVID-19 as a global threat.
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