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JEDI BILLION MOLECULES AGAINST COVID19 GRANDCHALLENGE
Screening billions of possible molecular compounds that can block SARS-CoV-2
​THE GRANDCHALLENGE
Improve (in silico or others) methods to identify compounds with blocking interactions relevant to any SARS-CoV-2 target, by optimizing/accelerating the use of HPC (High Performance Computing), Artificial Intelligence, and provide experimental validation.
The uniqueness of this JEDI GrandChallenge is to push for (i) modelling a number of active molecules at a scale never seen before (ii) the determination of a highly accurate list of active compounds cross-correlated by the teams all over the world, (iii) ultra fast-track in-vitro identification of molecules with 2-log reduction in viral activity and (iv) identifying the best drug-cocktail out of existing FDA-approved molecules.
An estimated 54 billion molecules have been screened by 130 teams, representing more than 500 scientists coming from the best institutions in the world.
As of February 20, 2021, 878 of the most promising molecules have been synthetized, compounds that didn't exist in any molecular library in the world. This is an immense and quasi unprecedented endeavor.
These top scoring compounds will be analyzed experimentally using direct affinity assays, as well as viral assays, with live SARS-CoV-2, in top laboratories in Germany, France and the United States.
54 billion molecules
130 teams
500 scientists
ONE CHALLENGE
54 billion molecules scanned!
130 Participating Teams to the JEDI Covid19 GrandChallenge
Program Manager
Prof. Thomas M. Hermans
Thomas Hermans is professor in Chemistry at the University of Strasbourg and group leader of the Laboratory of Nonequilibrium Complex Systems (www.hermanslab.com).
He received the ERC Starting Grant 2017, Thieme Chemistry Award 2018, Prix Guy Ourisson 2018, and is a Young Scientist at World Economic Forum and the World Laureates Association.
SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
Prof. Gregory Bowman
Director Folding@home and Associate Professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
Prof. Charles L. Brooks III
Research Group Leader, Department of Chemistry and Biophysics Program, University of Michigan
Prof. John Chodera
Research Group Leader at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Member of the project for simulating protein dynamics Folding@home
Prof. Babak Falsafi
Prof. Babak Falsafi Computer architecture, founder and director of the consortium EcoCloud, Professor in Computer Sciences, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Prof. Bryan Ford
Associate Professor and Head of the Decentralized and Distributed Lab of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Prof. Adolfo Garcia-Sastre
Director of the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute, Mount Sinai
Dr. Marion Guillou
Former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) and former chairwoman of Ecole Polytechnique
Prof. Marion Koopmans
Member of the advisory panel on COVID-19 of the European Commission, Director of a WHO collaborating center, and Head of the department of Viroscience, Erasmus Medical Center
Prof. Sang-Yup Lee
Director of the Bioinformatics Research Center, Korean Advanced Institute for Science and Technology
Dr. Nadia Naffakh
Head of the RNA Biology of Influenza Viruses Unit, Institut Pasteur-CNRS
Sir Peter Ratcliffe
Director of Clinical Research at the Francis Crick Institute and Nobel Laureate 2019 in Physiology or Medicine
Dr. Stephane Requena
Innovation and Technology Director, French HPC network GENCI
Prof. Bernhard Schoelkopf
Head of Department Empirical Inference
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems
Prof. Fabian Theis
Head of the Institute of Computational Biology and Research Group Leader, Helmholtz Zentrum Munich
Prof. Alexandre Varnek
Head of the Laboratory of Cheminformatics, University of Strasbourg
Dr. Daniel Verwaerde
Current CEO of Teratec and former CEO of the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA)