Precision Medicine Projects to Accelerate COVID-19 Treatment

The San Antonio Partnership for Precision Therapeutics (SAPPT) has announced the funding of three projects that will accelerate treatments for COVID-19 using precision medicine principles.

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Launched in 2019 to accelerate the process of getting therapies and pharmaceuticals from basic research to people in need, SAPPT was created by four leading San Antonio research organizations: Southwest Research Institute, Texas Biomedical Research Institute, The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, and The University of Texas at San Antonio.

SAPPT has awarded more than $600,000 to fund these projects, made possible through the USAA’s commitment of $1 million to organizations combating COVID-19. SAPPT organized and issued a call for proposals and within weeks had selected three projects to fund. Each is a collaborative effort among the four research institutions with promising early milestones.

The San Antonio Area Foundation also committed close to $100,000 to SAPPT to advance their efforts to understand, treat, and prevent COVID-19.

A team at Texas Biomed will study the role of the protein FURIN in COVID-19 and how it is potentially impacting individual responses to the virus. The team will initially study the role of the protein as a link to greater mortality rates for individuals with underlying cardiovascular conditions.

“While we’re talking about COVID-19 specifically in this research, the implications are much farther reaching,” said Larry Schlesinger, president and CEO of Texas Biomed.

“We can use what we learn here and apply that knowledge to combatting the next novel coronavirus, HIV and other infectious diseases. This study has a true precision therapy goal, since it aims to understand why certain individuals have greater severity of disease and why specific underlying conditions affect outcomes.” 

Researchers at UT Health San Antonio are working to identify how COVID-19 evades our innate immune system and blocks the body’s ability to quickly detect the virus and mount an antiviral response. The goal is to identify antiviral compounds either among existing FDA-approved treatments or in vast libraries of drug-like molecules that could effectively combat the ability of the virus to evade our immune defenses.

This work could not only broaden understanding of how viruses interact with human immune systems, it could also accelerate the process of identifying new antiviral treatments in the future.

“When San Antonio’s leading researchers come together, great things happen,” said William Henrich, president of UT Health San Antonio. “Among our four research institutions, we have the talented people needed to drive innovation through collaboration.” 

The third funded project will be led by researchers from UT Health San Antonio. The team is studying how COVID-19 evades the human immune system by mimicking the host RNA and growing inside the body. By understanding this process, the team hopes to develop novel inhibitors that can block specific pathways that permit the virus to replicate inside the host cell.

The innovative drug discovery platform will pave the way in developing a new class of drugs to fight COVID-19, while also preparing to combat emerging coronaviruses in the future.

“This virus causes disease with varied effects, from asymptomatic and mild symptoms for some infected persons to more severe symptoms that require hospitalization and intubation in others,” said Adam Hamilton, president and CEO of SwRI.

“And of course, in some unfortunate cases, the disease may lead to the patient’s death. In addition, COVID-19 seems to impact some parts of our community harder than others. Part of the SAPPT role is to work to find ways to prevent and treat this disease for all of our community.”

Through these three projects, researchers will continue to advance understanding of COVID-19 and its impact.

“These three additional projects support a strong foundation of transformative COVID-19 research happening in San Antonio. From better understanding the virus and applying custom therapies to developing drug treatments and vaccines, our partnership is in the unique position to make a real difference in the global impact of this pandemic,” said Taylor Eighmy, president of UTSA.