The "COMMUNITY SCIENCE AND THE FIGHT AGAINST THE CORON VIRUS" project is an open project of a community of dedicated researchers and volunteers, supported by CTK and other organisations, who want to contribute their work, knowledge and experience to the mosaic of knowledge about the new corona virus and the COVID-19 disease it causes. The group is led by Dr Črtomir Podlipnik and Dr Marko Jukić, with many years of experience in computer-aided molecular design, pharmaceutical chemistry and chemo/bioinformatics.
In a very short time, he and his collaborators and volunteers have developed their own technology that allows distributed computation of molecular anchoring. The technology is based on a small program that allows the user's computer to be connected to a server that distributes part of a library of molecules ready for molecular anchoring (currently 7 000 000 compounds). After the anchoring has been completed (by the program RxDock), the applet sends the calculated data back to a collection point on the server. After analysing the anchored compounds, the final result would be a list of molecules with potential binding to the therapeutic target (in our case, viral proteins). We could then check whether these compounds are deliverable and organise bioassays in collaboration with other research groups. Otherwise, information on non-deliverable compounds could be passed on to the research groups for synthesis. In an optimal scenario, compounds of interest to the pharmaceutical industry could be identified. In the short term, this is early research that can contribute to drug development. Web link to the project at https://covid.si/
