Development of a high-throughput screening system for SARS CoV-2 variants and screening for novel antivirals

The COVID-19 pandemic is the greatest public health disaster in over a century resulting in the death of nearly 6 million people world-wide. The virus has evolved over the last two years to highly transmissible variants, outpacing our efforts to contain it by mass vaccination. Effective drugs that can curtail the infection at early stages, preventing transmission and hospitalizations are essential to limit community spread of the new, highly transmissible variants. Due to the highly transmissible nature of SARS Coronavirus 2, most research on drugs and vaccines against the virus is confined to a few high containment laboratories around the world. Infection systems for the recent virus variants that can safely be used in normal laboratory conditions for drug and vaccine development is currently lacking, severely hampering our efforts to develop novel drugs effective against newer variants. This project envisions to develop such an infection system for the delta and omicron variants of SARS Coronavirus 2 that are responsible for most of the current infections. Furthermore, we will use this system to identify novel drugs and drug-targets that could potentially be developed into new antivirals that are effective against all prevalent variants of the virus.

Faculty Supervisor:

Anil Kumar Victoria Ansalem

Student:

Partner:

Applied Pharmaceutical Innovation

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services; Retail trade

University:

University of Saskatchewan

Program: