UNC Chapel Hill has secured a $65 million federal grant to establish a center focused on developing oral antivirals that can combat pandemic-level viruses, like Covid-19.
The funding the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health received is part of $577 million that the National Institutes of Health has awarded to establish nine Antiviral Drug Discovery Centers throughout the U.S. The centers will research candidate antivirals for Covid-19 and antivirals targeting other specific viral families that have a high potential to cause a pandemic in the future.
"Decades of prior research on the structure and vulnerabilities of coronaviruses greatly accelerated our response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and we hope that similar research focused on antivirals will better prepare us for the next pandemic," said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, part of the NIH.
The money builds upon and fits with an effort UNC has already started called Rapidly Emerging Antiviral Drug Development Initiative, or READDI. This is a global public-private partnership the university launched in 2020 with the goal of developing a number of antiviral drugs that could be effective against entire families of emerging viruses to treat people during epidemics or pandemics.
The initiative landed $18 million in state funding earlier this year and received $5 million from RTI International last year. This funding supports the initiative's goal of raising $500 million over five years. The initiative is also aiming to have five drugs ready for phase 1 testing within five years.
The effort includes collaboration with private companies. Earlier this year, READDI and Durham-based biopharmaceutical company Chimerix (NASDAQ: CMRX) shared what the organizations described as "promising early results" for a program called CMX521 at an antiviral research conference. The preclinical program is being studied as a Covid-19 treatment.
READDI has built a collaborative coalition of scientists focused on developing antiviral drugs against pandemic virus threats, said Ralph Baric, program director.
“To achieve these goals, our NIH sponsored READDI-AViDD Center is an international consortium that includes academic institutions, pharmaceutical companies and affiliated entities across five nations who work together to prevent life-threatening human coronavirus, flavivirus, alphavirus and filovirus infections," Baric said in a statement.
UNC is the second-largest NIH funding recipient in North Carolina and among the top 20 in the country. In 2021, the university received about $514 million for more than 1,000 projects, according to NIH data.
