On Mar. 9, 2020, AIM ImmunoTech announced that the National Institute of Infectious Diseases (NIID) in Japan will begin testing AIM’s drug Ampligen as a potential treatment for COVID-19, the new coronavirus infectious disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. The experimental program will be conducted at both the NIID and the University of Tokyo.

The testing and research are being conducted by Hideki Hasegawa, MD, PhD, Director of the NIID’s Influenza Virus Research Center, and Director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza, Tokyo and Takeshi Ichinohe, PhD, Department of Pathology at the NIID, Department of Biological Science and Technology, Tokyo University of Science.

“As we have been saying all along, this emerging pandemic is caused by a virus that has nearly identical regulatory RNA sequences to the original SARS coronavirus, known as SARS-CoV-1, in respect to pathogenesis. This means that the prior studies of Ampligen in SARS-CoV-1 animal experimentation may predict similar protective effects against the new virus.

The WHO has recently renamed this emerging, highly pathogenic virus as SARS-CoV-2,” said AIM CEO Thomas K. Equels. “Ampligen had excellent antiviral activity against the earlier SARS coronavirus in U.S. National Institutes of Health-contracted animal experiments. In those studies of SARS-infected mice, Ampligen stands out as the only drug tested that conferred a significant survival effect: 100% of the Ampligen-treated mice survived, while none of the untreated mice survived.

Because SARS-CoV-2 shares many critical similarities with SARS-CoV-1, Ampligen may have an important role to play in developing a protective early-onset therapy for this new highly pathogenic coronavirus in humans, where currently there is no known effective therapy. We are proud to work with Japan’s universally esteemed NIID in the battle to curb this emerging potential pandemic.”