Sai Life Sciences, one of the fastest growing (CDMO in English for development and contract manufacturing organization) manufacturers in India, announced today that it is collaborating with the COVID Moonshot project which aims to provide a antiviral drug candidate effective against COVID-19. With in-kind support from a team of medical chemists and support infrastructure, Sai Life Sciences will help synthesize and profile analogs for New Chemical Entities (NCE) and other previously known compounds tested on other viruses.

PostEra, a biotechnology company specializing in machine learning for drug discovery, is leading this initiative. Leading experts from the fields of computer-based drug discovery, chemical synthesis and biochemical testing join them. In the three months since its launch in February this year, the team has already identified more than 60 experimentally confirmed "fragments" that effectively target a key protein associated with COVID-19. The team has now launched a participatory production initiative to accelerate the design of potential drug candidates from these fragments and has received more than 4,000 contributions from people around the world.

Welcoming Sai Life Sciences to the consortium, Aaron Morris, CEO of PostEra, said: “We are extremely grateful to Sai Life Sciences for the contribution they are making to this project. They help us take the most promising participatory production ideas from the Moonshot platform and transform them into chemical reality. It is a generosity like this that gives us hope that the dazzling launch of this project could obtain a revolutionary result in the context of our search for an effective antiviral against COVID ”.

Speaking about the company's participation in the project, Krishna Kanumuri, CEO and Executive Director of Sai Life Sciences, said: “We are delighted to join this leading global initiative. The consortium's approach to finding treatments for patients in the fight against COVID-19 is a commendable cause, which fits very well with our objective of working with partners to accelerate solutions that improve life. "

Over the past twenty years, Sai Life Sciences has built a portfolio of new chemical entity discovery services based on a solid chemical synthesis platform. Today, the company provides innovative biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies with the full range of discovery services, from identifying and validating targets to new research drugs (IND in English) and also encompass a solid set of capabilities for the development of NCEs and manufacturing in line with current good practice in this area.