Out of the Crisis #13: Alpha Lee on remembering the 2003 SARS epidemic and his opensource COVID-19 Moonshot
As a child, Alpha Lee lived through the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong . The human toll a virus could inflict and the immense economic cost of the emergency response stayed with him. Unfortunately, the rest of the world soon forgot about it. In the years that followed, Alpha dedicated his life to science, pursing degrees in chemistry and mathematics, and starting a research lab the University of Cambridge . His lab specializes in accelerating the discovery of new drug compounds and treatments. Then he started a company called PostEra, which uses machine learning to identify promising compounds for new drug development. In January of this year, he arrived in the US with his co-founders as part of the winter 2020 YCombinator batch. When the virus began sweeping though the world, they realized the data they had on drug discovery and the building blocks of therapeutics could be applied to finding therapeutics for the coronavirus. That was when they launched their COVID-19 Moonshot p