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. 2022 Apr 8;8(4):713-720.
doi: 10.1021/acsinfecdis.1c00527. Epub 2022 Mar 14.

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

Kirandeep Samby  1 , Dominique Besson  1 , Anirban Dutta  2 , Buddhadev Patra  2 , Angelique Doy  1 , Paul Glossop  3 , James Mills  3 , Gavin Whitlock  3 , Rob Hooft van Huijsduijnen  1 , Alessandra Monaco  4 , Graeme Bilbe  4 , Charles Mowbray  4 , Benjamin Perry  4 , Anna Adam  1 , Timothy N C Wells  1 , Paul A Willis  1
Affiliations

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

Kirandeep Samby et al. ACS Infect Dis. .

Abstract

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.

Keywords: Pandemics; antibacterials; antifungals; antivirals; drug discovery; screening.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing financial interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Workflow for triage of ChEMBL compounds.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Selection of the final compound set (HBA: hydrogen bond acceptors, HBD: hydrogen bond donors, PAINS: pan assay interference compounds).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Composition of the Pandemic Response Box, by disease area.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Composition of the Pandemic Response Box, by stage of development.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Mode of action for compounds included in the Pathogen Response Box by (A) antivirals, (B) antifungals, and (C) antibacterials. For (A), the categories not labeled in the pie are all 1%.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Distribution of the Pandemic Response Box compound set, by region.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Pathogen diversity for screening of Pandemic Response Box.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Number of PubMed-listed publications, by year, that cite one of the three Boxes.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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