Project Information

• Status: currently supported by the Israel Science Foundation until July 2022.

Despite enormous efforts since the emergence of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (SARS-2), there has been yet no success in bringing a drug candidate to the clinic. The current widespread pandemic emphasizes the dire need for technologies that enable to rapidly find effective solutions against viral threat. We begin our focus on blocking three vital SARS-2 proteins for which structures at atomic resolution were solved by X-ray crystallography.

We have already identified a set of FDA-approved drugs as candidate SARS-2 inhibitors, which target the viral 3C-like proteinase (3CLpro), the viral spike protein and its cellular recognition target hACE2 receptor. We patented 69 "repurposed" molecules and managed to purchase 23 of them ,which were sent to the lab of our collaborator Dr. Lior Nissim , a synthetic biologist who implemented a novel synthetic biology platform for focused, rapid and simple identification, in conventional BL-2 labs, of small molecules that block SARS-2. Our platform is modular and with simple modifications could be adapted to treat other viruses as well.

ORF3a Channel Blockers

This is a new Covid-19 project proposed by Yair Ben-Chaim (Open U) and Michal Linial.
Status: under experimental testing to enable screening of molecules.