Preliminary research outcomes of Shennong Project—an anti-COVID-19 project led by Professor Liu Bing from the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi 'an Jiaotong University (XJTU) entitled "Systematic in silico screening in drug discovery for Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) with an online interactive web server” were published as the Cover Article in the Special Issue of COVID-19 ofJournal of Chemical Information and Modeling, a prestigious academic journal by American Chemical Society. Professor Liu Bing was the last corresponding author (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jcim.0c00821), and our hospital was the first corresponding affiliation. The findings of this article have captivated widespread attention from global researchers.
Shennong Project is jointly initiated by the First Affiliated Hospital of XJTU, Huawei Intelligent Medicine Department, Beijing Institute of Genomics of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tongji Medical College of Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Shennong Project aims to provide a quick solution to the COVID-19 epidemic. It has delivered systematical and virtual screening of the existing clinical drugs approved by FDA as well as traditional Chinese medicines. All research results have been released at https://shennongproject.ai/. The published public data have received extensive attention at home and abroad, and have been tweeted by many COVID-19 projects. Meantime, the research team has received a large number of consultation emails. This data platform provides theoretical basis for unraveling the molecular mechanism of many Chinese and Western medicines being used and tested in clinical trials. So far, it is the largest virtual screening database of COVID-19 drugs around the world, which is free of charge and open access.
Professor Liu Bing, currently working in Biobank of our hospital, is a top-notch young talent recruited from Imperial College London by XJTU. In 2000, he was admitted to University of Science and Technology of China, received two degrees from National University of Singapore in 2005, and received a doctoral degree from Imperial College London in 2010. Professor Liu Bing previously worked at Oxford University and Imperial College London. Encountered with such a sudden epidemic, Professor Liu Bing, as a scientific researcher, utilized his expertise in the field of protein structure biology, carried out scientific research on the prevention and control of COVID-19 and contributed to the fight against COVID-19 as a medical scientist.
