NIH awards $577 million to establish AViDD Centers for Pathogens of Pandemic Concern

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, has awarded approximately $577 million to establish nine Antiviral Drug Discovery (AViDD) Centers for Pathogens of Pandemic Concern.

The AViDD centers will conduct innovative, multidisciplinary research to develop candidate COVID-19 antivirals, especially those that can be taken in an outpatient setting, as well as antivirals targeting specific viral families with high potential to cause a pandemic in the future. These include paramyxoviruses, bunyaviruses, togaviruses, filoviruses (including Ebola viruses and Marburg virus), picornaviruses (including enteroviruses and other cold-causing viruses), and flaviviruses (including the viruses that cause yellow fever, dengue and Zika). The awards are a part of the Antiviral Program for Pandemics (APP), an intensive research program designed to speed development of therapeutics for COVID-19. APP is led by NIAID, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) and the Office of Research Infrastructure Programs, all part of NIH; and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), part of HHS.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for new antiviral drugs, especially those that could easily be taken by patients at home while their symptoms are still mild. 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."

Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., NIAID Director

The AViDD centers will conduct research on the early-stage identification and validation of novel viral targets, with an eye to identify small molecules and biotherapeutics that directly block viral targets. As drug candidates are identified and evaluated for properties such as potency and breadth, the most promising will enter late-stage preclinical development. Importantly, the centers can draw on the resources of their industry partners to accelerate research, making use of the companies' chemical libraries and expertise in moving candidates into the product development pipeline.

The AViDD award recipients are:

• Center for Antiviral Medicines & Pandemic Preparedness
  Principal Investigator: Sumit Chanda, Ph.D.
  Institute: Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California
• UTMB-Novartis Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness
  Principal Investigator: Pei-Yong Shi, Ph.D.
  Institute: The University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston
• Rapidly Emerging Antiviral Drug Development Initiative – AViDD Center
  Principal Investigator: Ralph Baric, Ph.D.
  Institute: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Development of Outpatient Antiviral Cocktails against SARS-CoV-2 and other Potential Pandemic RNA Viruses
  Principal Investigator: Jeffrey Glenn, M.D., Ph.D.
  Institute: Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California
• Antiviral Countermeasures Development Center
  Principal Investigators: George Painter, Ph.D. and Richard Plemper, Ph.D.
  Institutes: Emory University and Georgia State University, Atlanta
• Metropolitan AntiViral Drug Accelerator
  Principal Investigator: David Perlin, Ph.D.
  Institute: Hackensack University Medical Center, Hackensack, New Jersey
• QBI Coronavirus Research Group Pandemic Response Program
  Principal Investigator: Nevan Krogan, Ph.D.
  Institute: University of California, San Francisco
• Midwest AViDD Center
  Principal Investigator: Reuben Harris, Ph.D.
  Institute: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
• AI-Driven Structure-Enabled Antiviral Platform
  Principal Investigators: Ben Perry, Ph.D.; Alpha Lee, Ph.D.; John Chodera, Ph.D.
  Institutes: Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative; PostEra; Sloan Kettering Institute and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York City