Dear Volunteers,

After several weeks of behind-the-scenes work at the Forli Lab and with the World Community Grid team, we're happy to announce that OpenPandemics - COVID-19 is now live. The computing power donated by volunteers like you will enable us to explore a much larger chemical space than what would be normally accessible with our resources, and virtually screen hundreds of millions of molecules in the quest for promising treatment candidates. 

The project has two primary goals that we can accomplish with the help of your donated computing power: 

• We're running molecular docking simulations to evaluate chemical compounds as potential candidates for the development of drugs for the treatment of COVID-19. For that we will perform also the first large virtual screening for irreversible binders (i.e. suicide inhibitors) using a new protocol we developed, called Reactive Docking. This will allow us to target not only the whole viral proteome (i.e. every protein made by the virus) but also their interactions with the host proteins in a novel way that has the potential to deepen our understanding of the still largely unknown biology behind the COVID-19 disease.
  
  
• We're developing tools and methods that will allow future drug discovery projects to ramp up more quickly, and run similar large and ambitious computational screening with a fraction of the effort required today. This is very important in the perspective of future pandemics: by sharing tools and expertise, we will enable researchers worldwide to setup more easily large screening campaigns such as this one,  thus contributing to faster and more effective research on potential treatments for new pandemics. 
  

We'll make the data and knowledge we gain from meeting these goals available to the scientific community, in accordance with World Community Grid’s open data policy. We hope that our results will provide new starting points for the design of novel classes of drugs to target SARS-CoV2 and other coronaviruses. Additionally, the study can provide the foundations for the fast deployment of computational resources to help identifying potential treatments during fast-spreading pandemics. 

Thanks to everyone for your support and for making this effort possible!

Stefano