What You Need To Know
Mosquito-borne flaviviruses — including dengue, Zika, yellow fever, and West Nile — are a massive global health problem, with as many as 400 million dengue infections alone each year. But there are currently no antivirals approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat any of the flaviviruses.
Scientists at the Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI), in collaboration with Gilead Sciences and The Rockefeller University, are now tackling this problem head-on, securing a $2.5 million grant from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), part of the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), in collaboration with VITAL — a BARDA Accelerator Network Hub. The funding aims to advance new oral treatments for these pathogens.
The organizations are joining forces to target critical enzymatic functions in the viral life cycle. While previous drug discovery efforts have aimed at viral interfaces that vary widely between species, this program strategy aims at highly conserved functions across the entire flavivirus family. This provides an opportunity to achieve broad spectrum activity against multiple medically important viruses (e.g., dengue, Zika, West Nile, etc.) with a single drug.
To discover and refine top candidates, the public-private collaboration leverages each organization’s strength. Rockefeller University brings virology and high-throughput screening expertise. Candidate compounds will move through CDI’s pharma-style drug evaluation pipeline, which includes bioanalytical, pharmacokinetic, and in-vivo efficacy testing in preclinical models.
Supported by Gilead’s leading expertise and capabilities in medicinal chemistry, virology, drug metabolism and pharmacokinectics, manufacturing, regulatory strategy, and global access, the project team has collaboratively mapped out an 18-month roadmap to potentially deliver a lead candidate with broad-spectrum flaviviral activity and desirable drug-like attributes, with the goal of ultimately advancing to an Investigational New Drug (IND)-ready therapeutic candidate to protect communities against current and emerging viral threats.
The award further builds on CDI’s established leadership in translational antiviral discovery. Under Dr. Perlin’s direction, the CDI leads the Metropolitan Antiviral Drug Accelerator (MAVDA) in addition to two NIH-NIAID National Centers of Excellence for Translational Research to accelerate antibacterial and antifungal drug development.