Science collaboration and public knowledge-sharing is a core pillar of the INTREPID Alliance mission to accelerate antiviral R&D and increase the likelihood of identifying promising small-molecule antiviral leads to address new and known viral threats. The INTREPID Alliance’s ultimate aim is to facilitate filling the most critical gaps in the global portfolio of antivirals to help prevent future global viral pandemics or diminish the impact of outbreaks.

However, the current pipeline for antivirals is unsatisfactory and underprepared for pandemic risks.

Limited R&D investment, even for those viral families designated by the World Health Organization of greatest pandemic potential, is of great concern.

Small-molecule antivirals are important tools for rapid, scalable, and equitable responses to epidemic and pandemic threats, addressing both individual patient care and supporting broader public health strategies. They are versatile in that they can be targeted to a specific virus, or they can be broad-spectrum compounds designed to fight various viral infections including emerging infectious diseases.

Antivirals take time to discover and develop, following the scientific rigor required to design, optimize, test and approve new therapies. Innovation in antiviral R&D requires sustained investment, the application of novel technologies and approaches, and collaboration across academia, industry, and government to speed their development so that the world is better prepared.

To support the global research community, the INTREPID Alliance launched the Antiviral Toolbox. This curated platform provides easy access to a focused collection of tools and publications, including a Registry of Antiviral Compound Libraries, to catalyze the identification and development of small-molecule antivirals.

DrugReKindle GmbH, a Swiss-based drug repurposing company, is among the first biopharmaceutical organizations to integrate the INTREPID Alliance Antiviral Toolbox into a production-grade discovery platform. The Toolbox — an open-access resource designed to catalyze small-molecule antiviral R&D for viruses of pandemic and endemic concern — feeds directly into DrugReKindle’s Supergraph™: a continuously evolving, physics-aware representation of the known pharmacological space, designed to systematically surface repurposing opportunities that conventional pipelines leave behind. This article is the first in a series of features on how biopharmaceutical companies are using the tools provided by INTREPID to accelerate antiviral R&D.

INTREPID’s Antiviral Development Landscape maps where the antiviral ecosystem is underserved, which viral families lack credible therapeutic options, which mechanisms of action are over- or under-represented, and where preparedness is most fragile. The Registry contains information on multiple Antiviral Compound Libraries which identifies compounds whose safety and pharmacological profiles may already have been substantially characterized. DrugReKindle’s Supergraph™ integrates both inputs into a single reasoning structure that operates across four coordinated layers: curated data from public, proprietary, and Toolbox-derived sources; physics-based modelling of drug–protein binding and mutation-induced structural change at atomic resolution; AI models that combine structural, genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and clinical evidence; and an asset layer that converts the resulting signals into prioritized, stage-gated candidates.

The result is a workflow built directly against the gaps INTREPID has identified. As new evidence becomes available — a new structure, a new trial readout, a new variant of concern — the Supergraph™ re-scores the hypotheses in its space, and the most promising emerge as Phase-2-capable assets with an explicit mechanistic rationale, ready to enter biological validation through the same Cell and Animal Model Toolkit that the Toolbox has for the broader community.

The DrugReKindle team of computational scientists, cheminformaticians, machine learning specialists, bioinformatics and biopharmaceutical researchers, then layers in genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, as well as early clinical research data, to identify a priority list of Phase-2 ready compounds for biological validation.

While drug repurposing is not new, DrugReKindle is using advanced AI-powered analysis to identify new targets with higher precision systematically. Known safety and efficacy profiles are built into the analysis helping to improve the accuracy and probability of success. Candidate compounds that DrugReKindle considers the top best fit could advance to biological and clinical validation.

DrugReKindle identifies promising compounds based on those already studied in controlled clinical trials and real-world evidence, assets for clinical development are de-risked and biopharma development would have a higher probability to succeed in reaching the patients. Drugs that were shelved for various non-safety reasons may find new purpose based on scientific interrogation. Moreover, precision disease-drug targeting can help fill the gaps identified in the Antiviral Landscape, as well as cut time to development in response to an active outbreak.

For DrugReKindle, this is the operational thesis: by combining the open infrastructure that INTREPID has built for the field, with a physics-grounded, systematically executed analytical layer, precision repurposing can address the antiviral gaps that matter most — and on a timeline compatible with the speed at which new viral threats actually emerge.

INTREPID’s resources are publicly available as part of our commitment to support the research community in its quest to identify new potential antiviral treatments. As science and technology progress, stakeholders in the antiviral ecosystem must work together to apply novel approaches and breakthrough innovations to identify new treatments for patients and help strengthen global health security.

References:
International Pandemic Preparedness Secretariat (IPPS). 100 Days Mission: Implementation Report, Progress in 2025 & Priorities for 2026. 27 January 2026. Accessed March 2026.
INTREPID Alliance. Antiviral Clinical and Preclinical Development Landscape – 4th Edition. 30 April 2025. Accessed March 2026.
INTREPID Alliance. Antiviral Toolbox. Accessed March 2026.
Ruxandra Draghia-Akli, Nina M Hill, Bruce Altevogt, Kenneth Bradley, Kelly Chibale, Tomas Cihlar, Barry Clinch, James F Demarest, Johan Neyts, for the INTREPID Alliance, The Indispensable Value of Small-Molecule Antivirals in Epidemic and Pandemic Preparedness, Clinical Infectious Diseases, Volume 82, Issue 1, 15 January 2026, Pages e49–e55, https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciaf476.
World Health Organization (WHO). Prioritizing diseases for research and development in emergency contexts. Accessed March 2026.
DrugReKindle. https://www.linkedin.com/company/drugrekindle.