On May 5, 2021, Hoth Therapeutics announced it has expanded its sponsored research agreement with Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) for a potential COVID-19 treatment.

The expanded research agreement focused on investigating the potential of HT-002 to inhibit SARS-CoV-2 virus variants. This work was informed by the molecular modeling of SARS-CoV-2 spike peptide sequences from strain variants, reported in an earlier preprint publication in bioRxiv.