Through the collaboration, the organizations will work to find potential inhibitors of the main protease of SARS-CoV-2, which is required for viral replication. The DDD platform will mine Medivir's proprietary protease-targeted compound library to identify putative inhibitors and evaluate active compounds as potential drug development candidates. Data for the top 100 candidates will be released online and made freely available for drug development purposes.

The project is spearheaded by Kristian Sandberg, PhD, co-director of SciLifeLab's DDD platform and principle investigator of the Nevermore COVID project. This project is part of Sweden's national research program, funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation with a total of $54 million. The program focuses on establishing precompetitive, open science collaboration at SciLifeLab by engaging both industry and academic research groups for the discovery of antivirals for SARS-CoV-2.