The Pandemic Response BoxAccelerating Drug Discovery Efforts after Disease Outbreaks

The current Covid-19
pandemic has underlined the need for a more
coordinated and forward-looking investment in the search for new medicines
targeting emerging health care threats. Repositioning currently approved
drugs is a popular approach to any new emerging disease, but it represents
a first wave of response. Behind this would be a second wave of more
specifically designed therapies based on activities against specific
molecular targets or in phenotypic assays. Following the successful
deployment and uptake of previous open access compound collections,
we assembled the Pandemic Response Box, a collection of 400 compounds
to facilitate drug discovery in emerging infectious disease. These
are based on public domain information on chemotypes currently in
discovery and early development which have been shown to have useful
activities and were prioritized by medicinal chemistry experts. They
are freely available to the community as a pharmacological test set
with the understanding that data will be shared rapidly in the public
domain.