
Ask HN: What are the moonshots ideas to fight SARS-COV-2? - saadalem
We are unable to adequately model the genetic and biological aspects of humans and how individual components (of a drug) affect those genetic&#x2F; biological components individually and in concert.<p>imagine someone who was crazy enough to say... we will try to 10x everything we have done to date and FINALLY do computer simulations at an unheard of scale and complexity and MAKE the modeling&#x2F;digital testing breakthroughs that current people said were impossible.
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petra
The biggest barriers are not basic r&d , but clinical trials, and
economics/politics/manufacturing.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/20/when-will-a-
co...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/20/when-will-a-coronavirus-
vaccine-be-ready)

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saadalem
What do you think of moonshot ideas that could greatly accelerate human
trials, like computer simulations of virus/vaccine/host cell interactions,
something at a scale that humans have never demonstrated before ? If we had
enough data on human reactions to vaccines we could hypothetically predict
reactions to marginally different vaccines which would be a huge boost to the
development of them. Like it's crazy to think that penicillin and similar
fungi derivatives have a million antibiotic properties but when it comes to
viruses we're stuck developing extremely narrow highly tailored antivirals and
vaccines.

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buboard
You can look at equivalent projects for understanding the brain: the Human
Brain Project and the BRAIN Initiative. Impressive projects, but nowhere near
the success of particle accelerators

Like others said, many ways the virus could be deactivated are known. the
problem is finding ways to deliver those solutions, and testing it in humans.
It s a huge bottleneck, so a moonshot would be to test on artificial or
artificially grown organs

