A Moonshot for COVID-19
Meet the international coalition working to tackle COVID-19 in low- and middle-income countries
An open-science consortium fighting for accessible COVID-19 treatments has received £8 million from the Wellcome Trust, a London-based charitable foundation focused on health research. The group, COVID Moonshot, was born in the early days of global lockdown. At that time, an international cross-section of scientists, academics, pharmaceutical research teams, and students began a collaborative race to identify new molecules that could block SARS-CoV-2 infection and to develop pills ready to roll out to those most in need of affordable medicine.
Alpha Lee, of the University of Cambridge, noted that Moonshot’s early efforts – focused on repurposing existing small molecule drugs and rapidly developing monoclonal antibodies – have now shifted to developing new antiviral therapeutics in light of the likely persistence of COVID-19 as a global threat.
Between studying for my English undergrad and Publishing master's degrees I was out in Shanghai, teaching, learning, and getting extremely lost. Now I'm expanding my mind down a rather different rabbit hole: the pharmaceutical industry. Outside of this job I read mountains of fiction and philosophy, and I must say, it's very hard to tell who's sharper: the literati, or the medicine makers.
