This book highlights the different aspects of the research project E4C Horizon 2020 European
Project aimed at fighting the coronavirus by combining the best supercomputing resources and
artificial intelligence with state-of-the-art experimental facilities up through clinical
validation. Coronavirus disease has become an important public issue across the globe since
December 2019. There is an urgent need to develop potent anti-COVID-19 agents for the
prevention of the outbreak and stop viral infections. To this aim a public-private consortium
composed by European and national infrastructures center of excellence universities and a
pharmaceutical company started the E4C Horizon 2020 European Project: Its core idea was to use
the EXaSCale smArt pLatform Against paThogEns (EXSCALATE) supercomputing platform for a process
known as drug repurposing namely to identify the most promising safe in man drugs for
immediate treatment of the already infected population and then novel pan-coronavirus
inhibitors to address future emergencies. This ambitious goal exploited a chemical library of
500 billion molecules thanks to a processing capacity of more than 3 million molecules per
second made available by the computing power of the EXSCALATE platform.
