EU Launches Initiative to Accelerate COVID-19 Therapy Development

August 20, 2020 - The Corona Accelerated R&D in Europe (CARE) recently launched to quicken COVID-19 therapy development leveraging both public and private companies.

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The five-year initiative announced by CARE consortium member Boehringer Ingelheim builds on three pillars - drug repositioning, small-molecule drug discovery, and virus-neutralizing antibody discovery - to create safe and effective therapies for COVID-19. 

“The COVID-19 pandemic has emerged as the largest global health threat to humanity in this century, requiring the global scientific community to join forces in unprecedented ways,” Yves Lévy, professor, executive director of the VRI-Inserm and CARE coordinator, said in the announcement. 

“Beyond the scientific excellence of the different teams involved in this very ambitious project, CARE is bringing together 37 partners in an alliance pooling their expertise and know-how around an ambitious five-year work plan to develop therapeutics against the current COVID-19 pandemic. We are very grateful for the financial support provided by the Innovative Medicine Initiative that will enable us to implement this plan.”

Boehringer Ingelheim, specifically, will be leading the consortium, focusing on the development of virus neutralizing antibodies. 

The company will also provide antiviral molecules from its legacy HIV and HCV portfolio and small molecule candidates from a complete screen of its molecule library, Boehringer Ingelheim said.

CARE is supported by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) and funded by cash contributions from the European Union (EU) and in-kind contributions from eleven European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) companies and three IMI-Associated Partners.

So far, CARE received a grant totaling $92.5 million, or €77.7 million. 

Over 37 organizations have partnered with the initiative since the launch, including organizations from Belgium, China, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, and the US.

CARE is led by VRI-Inserm, Janssen Pharmaceutica NV, one of the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson (Beerse, Belgium), and Takeda Pharmaceuticals International AG, (Zurich, Switzerland).

“We are very excited to launch the CARE consortium and collaborate with other leading experts to urgently identify new medicines against SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses that may have the potential to cause epidemics,” said Marnix Van Loock, CARE project leader, senior scientific director and R&D lead of emerging pathogens, global public health, Janssen Pharmaceutica’s NV. 

“As part of this initiative, we look forward to applying learnings from an ongoing collaboration on COVID-19 with the Rega Institute for Medical Research, part of KU Leuven, to screen a drug repurposing library of thousands of existing drug compounds.”

With no licensed vaccines and only limited COVID-19 therapy options, the pandemic is ongoing and cases continue to increase every day.

CARE aims to leverage strengths of other initiatives, including the Gates Foundation-supported COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, MANCO, SCORE, and the ECRAID, Boehringer Ingelheim said.

In mid-March, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and Mastercard launched an initiative to boost drug discovery and biologics to treat patients with COVID-19. 

The Gates Foundation and Wellcome each contributed $50 million, while the Mastercard Impact Fund committed nearly $25 million to launch the $125 million funded project, the COVID-19 Therapeutic Accelerator. 

The project intends to identify, assess, and scale-up treatments to make products available and affordable for vulnerable communities. 

Partnering with COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator and other successful initiatives will allow CARE to advance the most promising drug candidates to clinical trials and accelerate the path to providing solutions for the current COVID-19 pandemic, members hope. 

“The CARE consortium aims to unleash the power of open science and collaboration in the service of society. We will work quickly and decisively in an unprecedented spirit of co-operation with our partners in academia and industry to defeat the unprecedented menace of COVID-19 and other serious coronavirus diseases,” said Clive R. Wood, PhD, corporate senior vice president and global head of discovery research at Boehringer Ingelheim.