AI Summary
The Albert Einstein College of Medicine has received funding from the NIH for a five-year project to develop vaccines and antibody-based therapies against emerging viruses. The project aims to build on lessons learned from COVID-19 by creating a base of critical knowledge about groups of similar viruses, allowing for the rapid development of specific countermeasures in the event of a new viral threat. The consortium, called PROVIDENT, will involve 13 teams working on various projects related to virus-host interactions, molecular mechanisms of viral disease, and protein design.
Albert Einstein College of Medicine has received a five-year, $14 million per year grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to participate in a broad national effort to develop “plug-and-play” vaccines and antibody-based therapies against a wide range of emerging viruses. The grant is part of NIAID’s new Research and Development of Vaccines and Monoclonal Antibodies for Pandemic Preparedness (ReVAMPP) Network, which was announced earlier today.
“COVID-19 taught us a lot about pandemic preparedness, and we want to make sure we build on what worked well,” said Kartik Chandran, Ph.D., the principal investigator on the grant and professor of microbiology & immunology, the Gertrude and David Feinson Chair in Medicine, and the Harold and Muriel Block Faculty Scholar in Virology at Einstein. “One of the key lessons from the COVID pandemic is that having existing research on a viral family allows scientists to develop vaccines and therapeutics for a particular virus much more quickly. In our project, we plan to create a base of critical knowledge about groups of similar viruses and then-;should a related “virus X” pose a health threat-;develop specific countermeasures as quickly as possible to save as many lives as possible.”
The Einstein-led consortium, called PROVIDENT (Prepositioning Optimized Strategies for Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics Against Diverse Emerging Infectious Threats), will link 13 teams in academia, government, and industry that will conduct four projects designed to:
Discover and analyze virus-host interactions and the molecular mechanisms involved in viral disease; Design proteins to elicit