Applied Pharmaceutical Innovation (API), a not-for-profit life sciences organization, has partnered with a University of Saskatchewan research scientist, Dr. Anil Kumar, to develop a high-throughput drug screening platform to identify novel drugs and drug-targets that show a high potential to develop new antivirals effective against all prevalent and emerging variants of the Coronavirus.
The high-throughput screening system will add screening capacity for thousands of compounds per day and help in the identification of lead compounds using genetic and compound library screening.
“SARS-CoV-2 is a biosafety level 3 (BSL 3) virus and through this project, we’re building an infection system that can be safely used in a BSL 2 lab at API. This system can be used to test thousands of compounds in a single run, accelerating the drug discovery process,” said Dr. Anil Kumar, Biochemistry, Microbiology and Immunology, University of Saskatchewan. “We are thankful to have API as an industry partner. With their partnership, we will have access to their well-established drug development pipeline and the compound libraries for the screening system.”
“It is incredible to see the ground-breaking research on SARS-CoV-2 that is happening in Canada. With this project, we’ll add a screening system for the BSL 2 lab that can be used to identify and assess the compounds created by scientists globally for developing antivirals against the COVID variants. This can immediately increase the range of potential antivirals available in Canada and globally that can help us fight future variants from the family of SARS-CoV-2 virus,” said Andrew MacIsaac, CEO, API.
