University of Louisville researchers land millions to fight future pandemics

A local university is getting millions to research how to combat pandemics, more than two years after COVID-19 hit the country.

The University of Louisville recently landed nearly $4 million from the Antiviral Drug Discovery (AViDD) Center for Pathogens of Pandemic Concern to continue research focused on fighting future pandemics, according to a release from the school.

Research will be aimed at stopping viral RNA, DNA's less famous cousin, from allowing viruses to copy themselves and spread infections. Researcher Donghoon Chung, associate professor of microbiology and immunology, is going to lead the team working on this project at one of the nine centers across the U.S. designated for this purpose.

“Once inside the body, viruses ‘commandeer’ host cells as factories and the viral genome becomes manufacturing instructions on how to make more Zika virus, for example,” Chung said. “The goal is to stop them from successfully copying that genome.”

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Together, the project has nine centers spread across the country. The National Institutes of Health, which awarded the money, has doled out over $500 million to create the Antiviral Drug Discovery (AViDD) Centers for Pathogens of Pandemic Concern, according to a release.

Money for the project in Louisville came from the Midwest AViDD Center, headquartered at the University of Minnesota. Other centers are led from universities ranging from the University of California in San Francisco to The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Of course, the centers will research potential solutions for the coronavirus pandemic.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for new antiviral drugs, especially those that could easily be taken by patients at home while their symptoms are still mild,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, NIAID Director, said in a release. “Decades of prior research on the structure and vulnerabilities of coronaviruses greatly accelerated our response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and we hope that similar research focused on antivirals will better prepare us for the next pandemic.”

In Louisville, Chung will work with the university's Center for Predictive Medicine and its Regional Biocontainment Laboratory, which is the only one of its kind in the commonwealth. Chung will work with infectious materials, but this lab is up to code when it concerns federal safety and security measures, according to the university.

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In addition to the COVID-19 virus, researchers will work on finding outpatient antivirals on other kinds of viruses, like picornaviruses, which cause common colds and flaviviruses, the ones that cause yellow fever, dengue and Zika, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Contact reporter Rae Johnson at RNJohnson@gannett.com. Follow them on Twitter at @RaeJ_33.