Chemist Tim Cernak is using two decades of experience in Big Pharma to try to save Gila monsters, loggerhead sea turtles, and many more creatures. In 2018, after nearly two decades working in Big Pharma, chemist Tim Cernak was ready to put his skills to a new use. For Merck, he'd developed precision therapies for cancer, HIV, and diabetes that could target disease while minimizing harm to healthy cells. But as a lifelong nature lover, he was increasingly concerned about the health of ecosystems and wondered whether his expertise could transfer. Animals, he learned, are often treated with pharmaceuticals formulated for humans, which affect them like old-school cancer drugs: Though intended to kill abnormal cells, they're indiscriminate in the harm they cause. For instance, the standard of care for frogs infected with a deadly skin infection is itraconazole, an antifungal that is often lethal for the amphibian.

Drug-repurposing studies are testing a range of compounds to treat COVID-19, but manufacturers may struggle to meet demand if any of these candidates prove effective against SARS-CoV-2. The pandemic has already strained global supply chains and limited the availability of a number of products, including hand sanitizer and diagnostic test reagents. The raw materials needed to make a new antiviral drug would most likely face similar pressures. But a team led by Tim Cernak of the University of Michigan has used an AI-based retrosynthesis program called Synthia to devise alternative routes to 12 leading drug candidates under investigation. The work appears on a preprint server and has not been peer reviewed (ChemRxiv 2020, DOI: 10.26434/chemrxiv.12765410.v1).

If umifenovir, a broad-spectrum antiviral, can fight COVID-19, then computer-designed synthetic routes could make it easy and cheap to produce. Science's COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation. As scientists uncover drugs that can treat coronavirus infections, demand will almost certainly outstrip supplies--as is already happening with the antiviral remdesivir. To prevent shortages, researchers have come up with a new way to design synthetic routes to drugs now being tested in some COVID-19 clinical trials, using artificial intelligence (AI) software. The AI-planned new recipes--for 11 medicines so far--could help manufacturers produce medications whose syntheses are tightly held trade secrets.