Funding for COVID-19 drug screening hub
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A new COVID-19 drug screening and resistance hub is to be established at the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research (CVR).
The ground-breaking project, CRUSH (COVID-19 Drug-Screening & Resistance Hub), has received £2.5m to establish a national resource which will initially be dedicated to supporting and accelerating vital COVID-19 antiviral innovation drug translation.
The facility is funded by £2m from medical research charity LifeArc, with additional funding from the Medical Research Council. CVR CRUSH will be delivered by the University of Glasgow in collaboration with partners LifeArc and the University of Dundee Drug Discovery Unit.
Global control of the COVID-19 pandemic is dependent on the availability of effective medical treatments and vaccines. CVR CRUSH will help support the global scientific effort against the disease by providing a fully integrated hub for pre-clinical drug screening and resistance assays for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, as well as providing the same services for other dangerous and deadly viruses in high containment facilities.
Work in the CVR facility will include studies to investigate promising drug candidates for COVID-19 treatment, and the mechanisms of how they work, alongside the integration of drug screening with the early identification of any possible drug and immune-resistant virus variants to accelerate the investigation process.
Professor Massimo Palmarini is director of the CVR: “While CRUSH activities will initially focus on the COVID-19 pandemic, the CVR and the CRUSH facility are well positioned to rapidly respond to future viral outbreaks, delivering innovation to address public health crises caused by high consequence viruses.”
The combination of industrial screening capacity in high containment facilities, availability of pre-clinical models and unrivalled virology expertise on site, will mean CVR CRUSH is uniquely placed to work with a range of partners looking to screen, validate and characterise therapeutics and diagnostics targeting COVID-19 and other high consequence viruses.