News Updates
Dr. Rodney Ho, the Principal Investigator (PI) and Director of the Center for WE-REACH talked with USA Today, Salon, and Geekwire to discuss remdesivir, lopinavir, and hydrochloroquinine as potential treatments for Covid-19.
As part of the center’s focus on providing scientists a bridge to medical impact, WE-REACH has prepared a list of funding opportunities with the NIH. For additional opportunities, see WE-REACH partner ITHS.
Congress and US federal agencies have responded to the coronavirus threat with funding aimed at fast-tracking promising technologies and products that can help address the needs. Examples of recently funded projects include support of the first high-throughput COVID-19 diagnostic test from Hologic as well as tests from several other companies.
Medical Countermeasures BARDA Portal
BARDA has provided a single point of entry to government agencies that are looking for products and technologies to address the COVID-19 outbreak. Open to independent entities or teams from academic institutions, government labs and private sector organizations.
Required submission materials include a description of your product or technology, a slide deck, manuscript, publications, or other non-confidential information.
Agencies are looking for vaccines, diagnostics, therapeutics, and other products and services.
Broad Agency Announcement
Additional information about the program
BARDA and the Public Health Emergency
COVID-19 Research Supplements to Current NIH Grants and Cooperative Agreements
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) has issued a Notice of Special Interest in response to the urgent need for research on the Coronavirus 2019 and the biological effects of its causative agent, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).
Research interests include, but not limited to, host factors, manifestations, complications, time course of virus-host interactions, biological pathways, use of artificial intelligence to understand the COVID-19 pathways and comorbidities, antibody response, development of GMP quality hyperimmune globulin from patients who have recovered, and testing strategies.
Dr. Simone Perazzolo, a scientist in the TLC-ART Program, was featured on Italian national TV explaining how an FDA approved protease inhibitor called Lopinavir (Kaletra) may be effective against Covid-19 since requires protease enzymes to replicate.
He has highlighted targeted and long-acting drug combinations containing Lopinavir + Tenofovir (HIV and Hepatitis B drugs) currently in late-stage development for human testing by TLC-ART. This therapy may potentially replace 30-60 daily pills with a single injection. This product candidate was made possible by innovations in drug combination nano-particle technology (DcNP) discovered by the TLC-ART Program led by Drs. Rodney Ho and Ann Collier with the support of the NIH/NIAID, Division of AIDS (DAIDS).
Please follow the video link for the full interview.
The Center for WE-REACH officially launched on Friday January 31st, 2020. With this announcement to ITHS partners in the WWAMI region, the center plans to educate the next generation of life science entrepreneurs and support value-added project funding to accelerate biomedical products from innovation to reach market and impact the community at large.
The news release has been covered by the following outlets: Geekwire, UW Today, and UW Medicine.
On December 9th and 10th, 4 members of the WE-REACH Executive Leadership attended the National REACH conference held at NIH Headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland. Dr. Rodney Ho (WE-REACH PI and Executive Director), Tong Sun (ITHS Executive Director), Jeanette Ennis (CoMotion Associate Director of Innovation Investments), and Dr. Terri Butler (WE-REACH Associate Director of Outreach and Communications) represented the University of Washington as one of 5 NIH-funded, public/private partnerships along with Rutgers University, the University of Missouri, the University of Colorado, and the Universities of Kentucky and Louisville.