What You Need to Know
The Hackensack Meridian Health Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI) has teamed up with other academic and pharmaceutical experts in New York City and Northern New Jersey to form a regional drug accelerator, the Metropolitan AntiViral Drug Accelerator (MAVDA).
MAVDA will address the need to develop novel antiviral treatments for SARS-CoV-2, its variants, other coronaviruses and pandemic viruses, as well as future viral threats.
MAVDA, will be funded by a three-year, $65,141,731 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID)’s Antiviral Drug Discovery (AViDD) Centers for Pathogens of Pandemic Concern program. MAVDA combines virologists and academic drug finders from Rockefeller University, Columbia University and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) in New York City, the CDI and Rutgers University in New Jersey, along with Merck, the Tri-Institutional Therapeutics Discovery Institute (Tri-I TDI) and Aligos Therapeutics.
The overall program will be co-led by drug discovery expert Dr. David Perlin at the Hackensack Meridian CDI and Rockefeller University virologist and Nobel laureate, Dr. Charles Rice.
The MAVDA consortium brings together scientists who already collaborate on many anti-infective projects, chief among them the CDI's NIH Center of Excellence in Translational Research (CETR), helmed by Perlin. This partnership, which coalesced during the federal agencies’ call for plans to discover new anti-viral therapies last year, seeks to leverage the strength of the partners on coronavirus and flavivirus targets. The scientists have a specific set of eight molecular features in the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Chief among them is 3CLpro.
"Drug Accelerator" Plan
The teams have put together a “drug accelerator” plan involving five cooperative projects focusing on the targets, and matching likely drug candidates against them. Six integrated pharma-style “cores” of MAVDA provide the expertise from the various institutions. In other areas, Columbia and Memorial Sloan Kettering will provide structural biology prowess, while the CDI and Rutgers will contribute medicinal chemistry know-how. The CDI’s capabilities in pharmacology and animal research models will also play a major part in the drug accelerator program, which patterns itself on the TB Drug Accelerator program, of which CDI members have played a major part over the last decade.
The goal is to take what the scientists discover on the academic side, and rapidly translate it using the capabilities of the pharmaceutical companies.
About MAVDA
The Metropolitan AntiViral Drug Accelerator, or MAVDA, has a mission to discover, optimize and test innovative small molecule antiviral drugs to target coronaviruses (CoVs), emphasizing SARS-CoV-2, and one or more select RNA viruses with pandemic potential. The goal is to rapidly develop drugs which can be given orally, and in an outpatient setting, in the near future. The group is funded by a five year, $108.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID)’s Antiviral Drug Discovery (AViDD) Centers for Pathogens of Pandemic Concern program. MAVDA combines world-class virologists and academic drug experts from the Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI), Rockefeller University, Columbia University, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), Rutgers University, along with proven antiviral drug developers Merck, the nonprofit Tri-Institutional Therapeutics Discovery Institute (Tri-I TDI), and Aligos.