Even as new vaccines roll out globally, the drug discovery work on COVID-19 is far from over. In an article in Drug Discovery News, Taconic Biosciences' Dr. Terina Martinez explores why infectious disease researchers will need to maintain or accelerate their efforts on both the vaccine and therapeutic fronts. She also discusses how animal models will evolve to support coronavirus research, citing the various types of models that are likely to play a central role in this important work:
“Given the likely timeline to vaccinate a global, mobile population, improved COVID-19 therapeutics are needed, beyond the repurposed drugs the medical community has turned to so far. Investigators will need specialized animal models to support this work. Initially researchers have leaned on existing models for their COVID-19 studies, including the transgenic mouse models expressing human ACE2 which were used in SARS-CoV-1 research in the early 2000s.
While this approach provided access to relevant models for studying SARS-CoV-2 out of the gate, it is just the first step. Much work is underway to bring next-generation SARS-CoV-2 models to the research community.”
Read more at: drugdiscoverynews.com
“Given the likely timeline to vaccinate a global, mobile population, improved COVID-19 therapeutics are needed, beyond the repurposed drugs the medical community has turned to so far. Investigators will need specialized animal models to support this work. Initially researchers have leaned on existing models for their COVID-19 studies, including the transgenic mouse models expressing human ACE2 which were used in SARS-CoV-1 research in the early 2000s. While this approach provided access to relevant models for studying SARS-CoV-2 out of the gate, it is just the first step. Much work is underway to bring next-generation SARS-CoV-2 models to the research community.”