Background

Both industry and academia are pursuing drugs for treatment of COVID-19

• US govt committed to $3B investment for development of antiviral drugs
• Gilead’s Remdesivir is approved or has emergency authorization in over 50 countries; however, clinical trial results are mixed
• Merck’s molnupiravir antiviral drug is currently under review by the FDA; data is also uncertain
• Pfizer’s novel COVID-19 protease inhibitor is in Phase II/III trials

Continued need for an effective COVID antiviral drug

• $6B market estimate for U.S. market of antiviral
• Potentially 18M US cases per year if the virus becomes endemic
• Worldwide, there have been over 270M COVID-19 cases and over 5M deaths, including ~800K deaths in the US

Technology Overview

The Center for Drug Discovery (CDD) at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) has constructed over 60 DNA Encoded Chemical Libraries (DECLs) that encode 6 billion compounds and has optimized DNA-encoded library screens, informatics, and follow-up off-DNA chemical resynthesis to facilitate a rapid pipeline from recombinant protein to potent hit.

BCM innovators have successfully identified low nanomolar covalent and non-covalent inhibitors of SARS-CoV-2 M^pro and generated co-crystals of SARS-CoV-2 M^pro with these small molecule drug-like inhibitors.

• Evaluated viral inhibition of M^pro inhibitors, using a live strain of SARS-CoV-2 virus
• Selected compounds successfully reduced cell death in a dose-dependent manner indicating that virus replication was stopped
• 

Stage of Development

Identified small molecule lead compounds currently being tested using in vivo transgenic mouse models.

Further Details

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34426525/

Applications

Treating COVID-19 & other potential Coronaviruses

Opportunity

Seeking licensure and/or commercial partner for further clinical dev.