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Professor Matthew Todd and Professor Robin Ketteler awarded grant

6 June 2022

Professor Matthew Todd and Professor Robin Ketteler awarded grant of £2 million for their open science research on drug discovery for pandemic preparedness.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, have awarded the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Health a $65 million grant to establish an Antiviral Drug Discovery Centre. The READDI-AViDD Centre will develop oral anti-virials that can combat pandemic-level viruses like COVID-19.

As part of this Centre, Professor Todd and Professor Ketteler from UCL have been awarded a grant of approximately £2 million toward their research on discovering new anti-virials before they’re needed. With colleagues in Chapel Hill, they will be responsible for designing making and optimising the molecules at the core of the consortium.

Professor Todd has said: “Many of us have been wishing we’d been better prepared for the COVID pandemic, with more potential antiviral medicines on the shelf ready to go. This grant will help us achieve that. It’s really exciting that the work will be driven by open science – everything we do will be publicly available in real time, to help the community in identifying the most promising antiviral targets and therapeutic. So if you’re reading this and you want to be involved in the research, you’ll find it easy to do that.”

Other collaborators include the Universities of Toronto, Duke, McGill, Rutgers, Wisconsin-Madison, Vanderbilt and Pennsylvania, the Structural Genomics Consortium and industry partners such as Janssen Pharmaceutica.

 

References:

https://uncnews.unc.edu/2022/05/20/unc-chapel-hill-receives-65m-from-nih-for-antiviral-drug-development-center/

READDI: https://www.readdi.org/

Professor Todd’s Open Source Drug Discovery Concept: https://chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cmdc.201900565