COVID-19 largely caught the world off guard, leading to a mad scramble to repurpose and develop drugs to curb the impact of SARS-CoV-2. Geoffrey Cumming wants to ensure that next time is different—and is donating 250 million Australian dollars ($171 million) over the next 20 years to make it happen.
The donation by Canadian businessman Cumming, who lives in Melbourne, Australia, is the centerpiece of a push to create a top pandemic therapeutic research center. That center, the Cumming Global Centre for Pandemic Therapeutics, will work out of a site in Melbourne to build a platform that can be applied to whatever pandemic pathogen arises, be it a coronavirus, influenza strain or drug-resistant bacterium.
Cumming’s donation, which is supported by AU$75 million from the Victorian government, reflects a belief that millions of lives could have been saved if COVID-19 drug developers responded as fast as the vaccine sector to deliver an effective therapy and make it available at scale.
“An effective pandemic response requires both vaccines and treatments but innovation in anti-pathogen therapeutics has lagged in comparison to vaccines, with AU$137 billion publicly invested globally in vaccines compared to just AU$7 billion in therapeutics during the first 12 months of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Sharon Lewin, director of the Doherty Institute, said in a statement.
The center aims to enable the rapid design and testing of new therapeutics with the goal of getting them to the community within months of a pandemic outbreak. Exactly how the center will try to achieve that goal remains unclear, although Nature reports that “a drug platform that targets nucleic acid, which would only need the genetic sequence of the virus to get started” is one option.
Biologics are another option, if the cost of production can be reduced to a level that makes widespread global use viable. Science added more details, reporting that the “areas of initial focus will be improving monoclonal antibodies that neutralize viruses, targeting viral RNA rather than a pathogen’s proteins and shoring up the human immune system’s own antiviral actions.”
The center, which has a 20-year funding target of AU$1.5 billion, is one of a number of initiatives that are intended to improve pandemic preparedness. Other efforts include funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Institutes of Health to, respectively, the Pandemic Antiviral Discovery initiative and nine Antiviral Drug Discovery Centers for Pathogens of Pandemic Concern.