trying to evaluate if I can help, and how much

· GitHub ·

2 min read Original article ↗

Thanks for your interest in helping out! I'm afraid we can't easily put any sort of timeline on this, since we can't be sure how long it will take to develop new therapies. Our effort at this point is to assist experimental collaborators (like DiamondMX) to rapidly discover new small molecules that may be active in inhibiting viral entry, and to better understand opportunities for targeting the viral protease and other important potential SARS-CoV-2 targets with the goal of accelerating the design or optimization of other therapies. All our data is being made rapidly open to reach the broadest range of scientists working in this area.

A month is an incredibly short time for drug discovery, and while we might hope to identify highly active molecules in that time, there are still a number of downstream steps to understand how those molecules behave in living systems, ensure they are safe, and work out delivery routes that would have to be carried out by entities equipped to do this sort of thing.

We'd very much appreciate you contributing spare compute cycles, but given the necessary timelines involved, I'd advise against renting GPUs you don't already control since we can't at all guarantee we would have anything like a workable therapy in a month.