The organization made the announcement in response to a call to action from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Innovation to support research, data mining, and analytics applications for COVID-19.

The new CAS COVID-19 Antiviral Candidate Compounds Dataset contains over 50,000 chemical substances from the CAS Registry. The database contains related metadata, including CAS registry number and physical properties. The dataset will also be the first chemical collection added to the Allen Institute for AI's COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19).

The curated collection of potential antiviral compounds CAS has developed provides a pool of potential molecules that have the potential to be repurposed as short-term treatments that can be immediately deployed for COVID-19.