#17 Alpha Lee - Crowdsourcing Discovery of a COVID-19 Drug

Bold Conjectures with Paras Chopra

Can you crowdsource your way to discovering a new drug?
Alpha Lee's startup PostEra launched a crowdsourced effort (called Covid Moonshot) to discover drugs that are effective in treating covid-19. This was the first of its kind effort that combined research efforts from several groups across the world to design a drug that treats covid-19, is free from patents and can be made cheaply and easily anywhere in the world.
== What we talk about ==
0:04 - Introduction
1:28 - What does your company, PostEra, do?
4:58 - Why is the traditional method of discovering drugs inefficient and hard?
9:52 - How do you find whether a computationally discovered drug will work?
11:25 - How do you optimize the drugs for toxicity, solubility, and other properties?
12:03 - How are you able to come up with a chemical synthesis pathway in a finite time?
16:44 - What are the areas where deep learning models have become better than humans in drug development?
19:18 - What’s the origin story of Covid Moonshot? How did it grow into what it is now? 25:24 - How was the experience managing people from around the world working on this project, especially when there is no central authority?
27:47 - The process of finding the target molecule
34:17 - Since Covid moonshot is all pro-bono and you are not filing for a patent, how do you see the process of regulatory trials, which is very costly, being done?
37:19 - By the time your drug comes, do you think the Covid-19 will be a much lesser threat? 39-49 - Do you plan to use the same approach for different diseases? And do you also envision driving the whole process of drug discovery in the future, and not just enablement?
41:41 - How do you align your science research interests with commercial interests?
43:46 - Haș an insight, while working on a problem, inspired a scientific question?
45:23 - The marriage of use of basic science and real-world problems
46:38 - How can someone help in the Covid Moonshot mission?
== About the guest ==
Dr Alpha Lee is the co-founder of PostEra, a start-up that offers medicinal chemistry as a service powered by machine learning. He did his Ph.D. at the University of Oxford. Currently, he’s at the University of Cambridge where his research group explores the integration of physics, statistics, and machine learning.