The COVID pandemic has unambiguously shown how unprepared mankind was against emerging and remerging viruses: in absence of vaccines and antiviral drugs “ready on the shelf”, millions have died worldwide, hundreds of millions got infected with long-term health consequences. While new vaccines have been rapidly made accessible, innovation and production of new drugs are still in their infancy. To fill this therapeutical gap, the US government has launched through NIH the Antiviral Drug Discovery (AViDD) program to fund nine centers, each bringing together dozens of scientists from very divers and complementary fields, such as molecular, structural and clinical virology, medicinal chemistry, enzymology and pharmaceutical partners for a total period of 5 years. These centers aim at finding new antiviral hits against high pandemic risk virus families (coronavirus, flavivirus, alphavirus…)
Dr. David Dulin from the Department of Physics and Astronomy is part of two out of the nine centers: one led by Ralph Baric from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and one led by Jeffrey Glenn from the University of Stanford. The Dulin lab will use the funding ($945k each) from these two centers to hire new staff members and establish cutting-edge assays to investigate the viral genome replication machineries of these viruses at the single-molecule level. These new assays will enable the discovery of new antiviral drugs and reveal their mechanism of action with unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution.