On May 4, 2020, Anixa Biosciences and partner OntoChem, announced they had identified its first therapeutic candidate against Covid-19, and has advanced the compound into biological testing.

This was the first therapeutic candidate identified from the strategic partnership recently established by Anixa and OntoChem to evaluate over 1.2 billion molecules through an in silico study to identify potential therapies for patients infected by SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Anixa believe that drugs targeting the molecular biology of SARS-CoV-2 will produce more powerful medicines than the drugs currently being evaluated in trials, most of which were repurposed from other diseases.

This first compound was expected to disrupt the interaction of the virus’s endoribonuclease with a host human protein that is necessary for the virus to replicate upon infection. Disrupting this protein-protein interaction is expected to dramatically reduce or eliminate the virus’s ability to cause disease. The biological testing will initially determine how well this compound binds to the endoribonuclease, and then how well this translates into reducing viral replication in human host cells.