MAVDA’s Second Annual Scientific Retreat at CDI Shares Progress, Strategy on Antivirals

The Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI) hosted the second annual scientific retreat for the federally-funded drug discovery consortium known as the Metropolitan AntiViral Drug Accelerator (MAVDA) on Jan. 26.

The meeting drew most of the researchers from MAVDA’s constituent institutions. MAVDA, co-led by David Perlin (CDI) and Nobelist Charles Rice, combines world-class virologists and academic drug development researchers from Rockefeller University, Columbia University and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and the Center for Discovery and Innovation, Rutgers University, and Princeton University in New Jersey, Yale University in Connecticut, the University of California - San Diego, along with antiviral drug developers Merck, the Tri-Institutional Therapeutics Discovery Institute (Tri-I TDI)-Takeda, and Aligos Therapeutics.

The investigators from each institution provided an update on their projects and results, and questions were asked by their peers. Also in attendance were the members of the MAVDA Scientific Advisory Board.

MAVDA’s mission is to discover, optimize and test innovative small molecule antiviral drugs to target coronaviruses (CoVs), emphasizing SARS-CoV-2, and one or more select RNA viruses with pandemic potential. The goal is to rapidly develop drugs which can be given orally, and in an outpatient setting, in the near future.

MAVDA is funded by a three-year, $65,141,731 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID)’s Antiviral Drug Discovery (AViDD) Centers for Pathogens of Pandemic Concern program.

For more information about MAVDA’s science, including their drug targets, visit the consortium’s website.