In addition, the teams were free to choose the protein target they deemed most promising, and 6 final targets were selected by the organizing team. The experimental studies needed to validate each compound therefore took considerable effort, funding, and time (~2 years). An iterative approach on fewer targets would have likely been better and faster. With the experimental protocols in place, subsequent rounds of predicted compounds could likely be screened in < 3 months, and could have served as input for additional computational rounds. Screening a library of off-the-shelf compounds, or even-better, known drugs would also have accelerated things (on-demand synthesis is not as fast and costs significantly more; new molecules will require going through all clinical phases).