On Apr. 6, 2020, Emory’s Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Unit (VTEU) announced its participation in a clinical trial testing a vaccine for the prevention of COVID-19, the first such vaccine to be tested in the U.S. The vaccine is called mRNA-1273 and was developed by NIAID and Moderna.

To date, the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has infected more than 1.3 million people with COVID-19 and caused nearly 74,000 deaths in a worldwide pandemic. Currently, no antiviral drugs have been approved to treat SARS-CoV-2 or any of the other coronaviruses that cause human disease.

The goals of the Phase I study, which began Mar. 16 at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle, are to test whether the investigational vaccine is safe, and how much it stimulates the immune system. If the vaccine is found to be safe, future studies will examine whether it can prevent infection.

Researchers at the UNC-Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health are playing a key role in the development of EIDD-2801. Viral epidemiologists in the lab of Ralph Baric, PhD, William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, are working with colleagues at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) and the nonprofit DRIVE (Drug Innovation Ventures at Emory) to test the drug, which was discovered by scientists at the Emory Institute for Drug Development (EIDD).

The results of the team’s most recent study were published online April 6 in the journal Science Translational Medicine. The new paper includes data from cultured human lung cells infected with SARS-CoV-2, as well as mice infected with the related coronaviruses SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV.

The study found that, when used as a prophylactic, EIDD-2801 can prevent severe lung injury in infected mice. (EIDD-2801 is an orally available form of the antiviral compound EIDD-1931; it can be taken as a pill and can be properly absorbed to travel to the lungs.)

When given as a treatment 12 or 24 hours after infection has begun, EIDD-2801 can reduce the degree of lung damage and weight loss in mice. This window of opportunity is expected to be longer in humans, because the period between coronavirus disease onset and death is generally extended in humans compared to mice.