UNC-Chapel Hill receives $65M grant to prepare for next pandemic
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hills is getting $65 million from the National Institutes of Health to prepare for the next pandemic.
The money will be used to establish an Antiviral Drug Discovery Center.
Researchers say investing in antiviral drug discovery is the best way to be prepared for the next pandemic.
"When COVID-19 emerged, clearly we didn't have all of the drugs and vaccines that we needed on hand," said Dr. Nat Moorman, a co-founder of the center and professor at UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Medicine.
"Peope have made heroic efforts over the past two years to make sure that those drugs have been developed as rapidly as possible," said Moorman.
Moorman said researchers are focused on creating accessible medicine.
"We're focused on making drugs, specifically a pill, that would be readily available for anyone to take. As soon as that next virus emerges, our goal would be that you could go take a test [and] it would tell you that you have the virus and you could go to the pharmacy and get a prescription right away," said Moorman.
Ralph Baric, a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill's Gillings School of Global Public Health, said researchers want to target high priority viruses that could threaten humanity.
"These included coronaviruses and filovirus, like Ebola and marburg, and flaviviruses, like dengue and zika, and alphaviruses like chikungunya and the encephalitic alphaviruses," he said.
Baric calls the $65 million grant a "game changers."
"As you might imagine, the commercial market for a pandemic that hasn't happened yet is not too large," said Baric.
"It helps us accelerate our work, and it lets us really expand upon what we've started by bringing in regional, national, international, academic and industry partners to accelerate the work of discovering the drugs we need," said Moorman.
The money will be used to establish an Antiviral Drug Discovery Center, with 27 partners from across the Triangle and around the world.
"Part of our program is to try and make these drugs available to not only the resource rich nations of the world but also the research poor nations of the world," said Baric.
The center is one of nine established by the NIH in public private partnerships.
