New Australian research centre aims to speed up pandemic drug discovery
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[August 31, 2022]
By Jennifer Rigby
LONDON (Reuters) - A new research
institution being launched in Australia will aim to develop drugs to
treat diseases caused by pathogens with the potential to cause global
pandemics more quickly.
The Cumming Global Centre for Pandemic Therapeutics, based in Melbourne,
is the latest in a series of similar initiatives, including from the
National Institutes for Health in the United States and the Pandemic
Antiviral Discovery (PAD), a group led by the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation and other partners.
Vaccines to protect against COVID-19 were developed in record time, but
antiviral drugs took longer, with the first approved for use just under
two years after COVID-19 was found in Wuhan, China at the end of 2019.
The team behind the new centre in Australia want to speed up that
process. They are branding themselves as the "CEPI of therapeutics,"
referring to the Centre for Epidemic Preparedness and Response, a global
partnership that helped to fund the rapid development of some COVID-19
vaccines.
The Cumming Centre is backed by a A$250 million ($173.63 million)
donation from Geoff Cumming, a Canadian businessman now living in
Australia, for use over two decades. The Centre aims to ultimately raise
A$1.5 billion, including funding from governments.
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![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2022/Aug/31/images/ads/current/2022%20Business%20Directory%20Cover%20lda%202022.png) Rather than targeting particular
diseases, the Centre will focus on platforms, aiming to find new
ways of treating and ultimately stopping viruses from HIV to
influenza, as well as coronaviruses and others that could cause
global outbreaks.
"Our goal is to develop and invest in new
technologies that will allow much more rapid development of
anti-viral therapeutics – a bit like how we could make a vaccine so
quickly, with mRNA, because all we needed was a target sequence,"
said Sharon Lewin, an HIV researcher and professor of medicine at
the University of Melbourne, who will lead the Centre.
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"We need those technologies because with the existing technologies,
there isn't a way to speed up what we currently do. And we've seen
antivirals actually play a really important role in pandemics. You
can save a lot of lives with antiviral drugs," she said in an
interview.
Lewin said there were three approaches that had promise: nucleic
acid therapeutics, treatments that modulate the innate immune
response, and developing cheaper and simpler to use antibody
therapies.
($1 = 1.4399 Australian dollars)
(Reporting by Jennifer Rigby in London. Editing by Jane Merriman)
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