The virus itself has protein spikes covering the outside of it, says Professor Jabbour. That protein is the agent that latches onto human cells a process called docking, in the same way you would dock your phone or tablet to charge it. We were looking for a nanoparticle that would cap the ends of the proteins, essentially deactivating the virus by weakening its ability to dock with the host. Its like welding a key so it no longer fits in the lock.
Professor Jabbour and Postdoctoral Researcher Ned Booker used AI, in the form of machine learning and data mining, to sift through hundreds of thousands of chemicals and test them to find out which of them were the greatest threat to the virus….