Nae king! Nae quin! Nae laird! Nae master! We willnae be fooled again! ― Terry Pratchett, Wee Free Men 2003

Working on new antivirals with the whole team in the @asapdiscovery.bsky.social consortium is incredible, great science, superb committed team all focussed on current and potential future viral threats. Front rank science applied to reducing human suffering ✅.

This is why we do medicinal chemistry: www.science.org/content/blog.... @dndi.org

Chemistry in current events: the connections between fertilizer, the Haber-Bosch process, and the Persian Gulf. Read this and your knowledge will exceed that of most of our current political leadership after only a few minutes of light work:

If you have anything to do with young people(I’m a a High School Trustee, my wife is a Girl Guide Commissioner) the scars are still clear, if you take even a moment to look.

This:

Something incredible I learned (re-learned?) tonight is that the blog post where the first SARS-CoV-2 genome was shared - six years ago on Saturday - included the most iconic footnote of all time

If you’ve ever worked in cancer research, this: xkcd.com/3172/

Save the date! Next year's European #RDKit UGM will take place from 16-18 September in Darmstadt, Germany. Pre-registration will open in early 2026.

Yay! #RDKit

Great news! 🎉 Following an independent expert review, we have formally nominated the broad-spectrum pan-coronavirus antiviral ASAP-0017445 as a pre-clinical drug candidate. 🔗Read the press release here: dndi.org/press-releas...

I first wrote about some of the early stages of this project in March 2020 (cen.acs.org/pharmaceutic...). I've been privileged to follow along since then (cen.acs.org/pharmaceutic...). Congratulations to everyone who contributed.

ASAP is incredibly proud to work with superstar antiviral discovery scientists at Mount Sinai: Briana McGovern, Meg Gordon, Dr. Kris White, Dr. Suazo, and Jared Benjamin, among others! Read about their important work here: health.mountsinai.org/blog/stories...

Heading overland to the #RDKit UGM, trying out the sleeper Brussels ->Prague from a London-> Brussels Eurostar. But first:

Disease prevalence in US states before & after vaccine introduction 🧪 From Edward Tufte & graphics.wsj.com/infectious-d...

Results so stunningly clear they inspired this classic xkcd (xkcd.com/2400/):

showyourstripes.info/c/europe/uni... Priorities people:

Ouch…

AI advances are all about getting enough good data. For the first time this is data at the scale we need it for faster drug discovery. This could make a difference to so many diseases.

If you weren’t able to attend our Symposium on Open Drug Discovery in Montreal in April, you’re in luck - the recordings are now on YouTube and the slides are on Zenodo! 🎥 Watch the recordings: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... 📄 Access the slides: zenodo.org/communities/...

Learning about European approaches to Pandemic Preparedness “We’re not safe till we’re all safe”: @asapdiscovery.bsky.social at: health.ec.europa.eu/events/hera-... #HealthUnion

Brilliant explainer from Pascale how to use patents as enablers in preparing for the next pandemic.

Today, @griffen-ed.bsky.social explains at the Open Drug Discovery Symposium how @asapdiscovery.bsky.social has developed a hybrid intellectual property model that counterintuitively uses patents to support open science innovation and ensure affordability & global access. 🔗 shorturl.at/gMY0t

If this sparks your interest there's more of our background thinking published on open access in Wellcome Open Science: wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/9-374

Here’s a post on this molecule, and good luck to all involved!

Massive credit to all members of @asapdiscovery.bsky.social :- drug discovery is a massive team sport. Especially the chemists at Enamine working through the war.

If you, like me, do not particularly want to die by bleeding out of your eye sockets from diseases like Ebola, and think it's dumb to cut funding for viral countermeasures for future pandemics "because the COVID pandemic is over", here's something you can do about it: resist.bot/petitions/PX...

New pancoronavirus antiviral targets the main protease (Mpro) of the two different coronaviruses that cause Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and COVID-19. Via @laurahowes.bsky.social @cenmag.bsky.social cen.acs.org/acs-news/acs...

Three days to go until the unveiling of our MERS-CoV/SARS-CoV-2 oral antiviral candidate for preclinical development!

Lead medicinal chemist Ed Griffen (@griffen-ed.bsky.social) will be disclosing the new ASAP MERS-CoV/SARS-CoV-2 oral antiviral at @acs.org on Tue 25 Mar! Tune in to this virtual session to hear about its discovery and development! acs.digitellinc.com/live/34/sess...

✨Another symposium session reveal✨ Featuring Max Morgan and @griffen-ed.bsky.social, this session features speakers inventing and actively implementing new strategies that centre open science and collaboration to drive drug discovery! Register here: conscience.ca/symposium2025

3 weeks to go🚀 @griffen-ed.bsky.social is presenting at #ICAR2025 the highlights of the discovery, in vitro and in vivo profile of the ASAP AViIDD Center’s pre-clinical candidate for treating 6 lethal coronavirus infections: ASAP-0017445. Register now 🔗 lnkd.in/gbBRZSz2 @asapdiscovery.bsky.social

5 weeks to go🚀 @griffen-ed.bsky.social is presenting at the @conscience-network.bsky.social Symposium. Talk Title; "Balancing Open Science and Intellectual Property to Discover and Develop Medicines” @asapdiscovery.bsky.social Register now: conscience.ca/symposium202...

5 weeks to go! 🚀 Dr @griffen-ed.bsky.social is presenting at the ACS Spring Meeting & Expo. Talk Title; “Discovery of non-peptidomimetic oral combined MERS and SARS-CoV-2 anti-virals." @asapdiscovery.bsky.social @acs.org #ACSSpring2025 Click to register 🔗 www.acs.org/meetings/acs...

Ok, we need a new James Bond AND a new Archbishop of Canterbury, and pretty soon it'll be time for another new Willy Wonka and a new Doctor Who. We need to economise. They should all be amalgamated into a single new character called Archdoctor Bondwonka.

Excited to share what I’ve been working on with @tkaraletsos.bsky.social to transform the field of drug discovery with atomistic foundation simulation models! I could not be more thrilled to be working with this dream team. achira.ai

Should be a fascinating session looking at real life challenges in open science drug discovery.

If you work in drug discovery and you read one thing this weekend, make it this exceptional J Med Chem editorial. Hits on almost every blessed thing I’ve tweetorialized over the last several years. Quantitation and Error Measurements in Dose–Response Curves

Movies as paper titles: Splinter, M. et al. (1990). "Traditional ninjitsu training increases overall survivability (OS) in an adolescent cohort of wood turtles, Glyptemys insculpta, exposed to ionizing radiation in the New York sewer system." Rept Gen. 90(6):407-409.

If you are in the Boston area this April, I recommend visiting RDKit North American UGM/Cheminformatics Meeting on April 10th bagimcommunications.blogspot.com/2025/01/rdki... #ChemSky #cheminfomatics #compchem

John’s self-avoiding walk paper is on my list of ‘essential but salutary reading’ for any medicinal or agrochemical chemist. This is going to the top of my post-Christmas reading.

For fans of the self-avoiding walk... A new pre-print - 1. Delaney J. A Simplified Model of Iterative Compound Optimization. ChemRxiv. 2024; doi:10.26434/chemrxiv-2024-g1pcp-v2 This content is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed.

Taking the low carbon route from Berlin to Bruxelles on the Nightjet enabled by an Interrail card.14h but 10x less CO2.

🧪

There's a new #RDKit blog post introducing some new functionality that I'm really excited about: doing efficient substructure and similarity searches in very large chemical libraries: greglandrum.github.io/rdkit-blog/p... #ChemSky

Talking to clinicians last week I was reminded about the importance of TPPs and TCP in drug discovery. I'm a fan of these as the place where can meet and build a common language to get new treatments right. Here's a worked example from @asapdiscovery.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=3frZ...

The great Diamond team, part of the @asapdiscovery.bsky.social and @covid-moonshot.bsky.social backbone.

We need to innovate to be ready for the next pandemic threat: Pascale Boulet from @dndi.org and I gave a webinar on creative IP and licensing agreements and it's now available with the slides and paper as background. Doing what we did last time isn't be good enough. www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCkF...,

Optimist: The cup is half full. Pessimist: The cup is half empty. Medicinal Chemist: The cup is half full +/- 50% Process chemist: Screen the cup until it is 98.8% full