Consortia’s Critical Role in Developing Medical Countermeasures for re-emerging Viral Infections: A Usa Perspective

Abstract

Viral infections, such as Ebola, severe acute respiratory syndrome/Middle East respiratory syndrome and West Nile virus have emerged as a serious health threat with no effective therapies. These infections have little commercial potential and are not a high priority for the pharmaceutical industry. However, the academic community has been active in this area for many years. The challenge is how to take this academic virology knowledge into a drug discovery and development domain. One approach is the use of consortia and public–private partnerships – this article highlights ongoing efforts in the USA. Public funds, such as those from government sources, can support research efforts that do not to appear to have commercial value. The key to success is finding a way to combine the different cultural and operational values and reward systems into a productive collaboration to identify new antivirals.

Accelerating Drug Development: Antiviral Therapies for Emerging Viruses as a Model

“…A few such examples are active in the antiviral domain; one is the Antiviral Drug Discovery and Development Center, or AD3C, funded by the Centers of Excellence for Translational Research program from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). This consortium brings together basic virologists in US academia with experts in HTS, medicinal chemistry, and drug development at Southern Research, a nonprofit research institute, and Gilead Sciences, a pharmaceutical company (42). Another slightly different example is Drug Innovation Ventures at Emory, LLC (DRIVE), a nonprofit organization at Emory University whose leaders have prior pharmaceutical industry experience to provide the infrastructure and management while relying on the basic academic virology research (43).…”

Highlights of the 30th International Conference on Antiviral Research

“…Based on the success of the ADDA, the UAB/SR team obtained a U19 grant from NIH in 2014 to establish the Antiviral Drug Discovery and Development Consortium (AD3C) ( Fig. 5), which combines the expertise of prominent virologists in academic centers and the pharmaceutical industry with the HTS and medicinal chemistry resources of SR (Everts et al, 2016(Everts et al, , 2017. The AD3C is currently focusing on countermeasure development against important pathogens in the flavivirus, alphavirus and coronavirus families and on influenza viruses.…”