The Joint  European Disruptive Initiative (JEDI) is a European funding agency aiming at promoting

disruptive technologies In business theory, disruptive innovation is innovation that creates a new market and value network or enters at the bottom of an existing market and eventually displaces established market-leading firms, products, and alliances. The concept w ...

. Inspired by the US

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Ad ...

, it funds innovation in different "missions" (environment and energy, healthcare, education, digital, space, and oceans), with the goal of bringing "

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located enti ...

in a leadership position in breakthrough technologies". It organizes scientific competitions focused on disruptive technologies. In June 2020, the Joint European Disruptive Initiative was present in 25 countries, with 3.700 persons involved.

Research on Covid-19

The Joint European Disruptive Initiative launched its first "Darpa-type GrandChallenge" on

Covid-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. The disease quickl ...

on May 5th, 2020. The competition consisted in screening "billions of molecules with blocking interactions on

SARS-CoV-2 Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2) is a strain of coronavirus that causes COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019), the respiratory illness responsible for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The virus previously had a No ...

" to develop a drug against the coronavirus — with each participant having to use at least three different calculation methods for the simulations. The foundation claims to have had approximately 54 billions of molecules screened and 878 of them being synthesized. A paper published in

Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans ar ...

showed that the protein PDB 6W9C was one of the most used in silico

drug A drug is any chemical substance that causes a change in an organism's physiology or psychology when consumed. Drugs are typically distinguished from food and substances that provide nutritional support. Consumption of drugs can be via inhal ...

design against

References

{{Reflist Research councils Science and technology in Europe Grants (money) Life sciences industry Research projects