What you need to know
Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI) is collaborating with Merck to investigate drugs for treating COVID-19.
The CDI will work with Merck to identify candidate treatments for the still-spreading pandemic.
This collaboration effort to rapidly discover new treatments for COVID-19 grows out of the CDI’s NIH Center of Excellence in Translational Research (CETR), helmed by David S. Perlin, Ph.D., the chief scientific officer and senior vice president of the CDI, to discover novel antibiotics against high-threat pathogens. The CDI is pursuing further funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support this work.
Finally, the current collaboration leverages CDI’s expertise in academic drug discovery and evaluation of viral pathogens under biosafety-level 3 conditions, and Merck’s long-standing excellence as a global leader in the discovery and development of anti-infectives against the world’s most important diseases.
Currently there is no approved vaccine nor broadly effective antiviral treatment for human and animal coronavirus. Thus, identifying effective drug treatment options as soon as possible is critical for the COVID-19 response.