Covid-19 response

The role of the Centre for Drugs and Diagnostics

Covid-19 response. the role of the Centre for Drugs and Diagnostics

Establishment of a COVID-19 preclinical pipeline for therapeutics

CDD’s therapeutics team, including staff of Professors Biagini, Ward and Dr Joe Turner groups, have been working with a cross-campus (University of Liverpool) consortium of some 40 scientists to establish a COVID-19 preclinical pipeline to identify, prioritise and validate preclinical candidates for therapeutics suitable for clinical Phase I and Phase II studies. These activities include the set-up and validation of in vitro screening platforms and in vivo COVID-19 disease models, including pharmadynamic-pharmakinetic (PD-PK) modelling and simulations to predict clinical efficacy. The pre-clinical pipeline has been used to screen drug libraries as well as new chemical entities (NCEs) and new drug combinations. The results from the pre-clinical pipeline provides evidence-based data to inform onward clinical trial efforts such as the BMGF-funded MALCOV of Professor Feiko ter Kuile.