The historically Black Meharry Medical College said on Friday that it will get vital research and technical support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to advance its development of a drug for patients infected with COVID-19.
For Meharry, this means that MRCV-19, the compound it is developing, can sprint forward to the NIH for preliminary testing, possibly in the coming weeks, said the medical college’s CEO and infectious disease expert Dr. James E.K. Hildreth, to Diverse.
“We will quickly know whether or not it has promise” as a COVID-19 drug candidate, he said, and can move forward in the rigorous journey new drugs take to the marketplace. The path includes testing the drug first on mice and then in people. A small human trial with about 10-20 people could begin at Meharry by early fall, Hildreth said.
In April, Diverse was the first to report on Meharry’s initial effort to join the global race to develop an antiviral or drug therapy for patients infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. At the time, Meharry’s Dr. Donald Alcendor, associate professor and lead scientist, said his team’s research approach is to keep this novel coronavirus from replicating once it enters the body, a process that can help reduce the severity of the infection and slow its spread.
For Meharry, support from the NIH will provide a much-needed boost. And it couldn’t have happened at a more critical moment.
Meharry’s collaboration with the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world comes even as the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. is laying bare significant health disparities that African Americans have faced for centuries. In addition, historically Black colleges or universities (HBCUs) like Meharry have often been shortchanged when it comes to support for their work to undo these disparities.
It took a pandemic to “relax a lot of barriers” to federal research support that his college could have otherwise faced. Today, “Meharry is one of many institutions taking advantage of the technology at NIH to expedite the discovery of a promising drug to treat COVID-19,” said Hildreth. “We’re really glad that we can be a part of this and reduce our research costs.”
