Students of the Scientific Baccalaureate at the Pompeu Fabra Institute have carried out a study to find new medicines for COVID-19 as part of the Erasmus + project that deals with medicinal plants this 2020-2021 academic year. They have done the first phase of research in the pharmaceutical industry: in silico research using codes and software belonging to the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the University of California San Francisco.

They have studied chemicals from Taiwan’s natural product database that are part of a mixture of medicinal plants used in China, intravenously to treat COVID-19 in the ICU and previously used in chronic inflammatory diseases. They have downloaded the main protease from the Protein Data Bank and analyzed the strength at which natural products bind to the protein so that they have found inhibitors of this key protein in the virus.

This research have been presented as an Innovation Educational Research project at the conference "Jornada Programa 2021" organized by Department of Education, Generalitat de Catalunya (Goverment of Catalonia).