On Mar. 31, 2020, Sorrento announced it had entered into a research testing agreement with The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston for the preclinical testing of Sorrento’s COVID-19 therapeutic product candidates. Dr. Slobodan Paessler, DVM, Ph.D., John S. Dunn Distinguished Chair in Biodefense and scientific director of the Animal Biosafety Laboratory 3 at the Galveston National Laboratory, will be supervising the research.

The work will be performed at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), one of only two maximum containment laboratories on a university campus in the United States and one of just a few such Biosafety Level 4 (BSL4) laboratories currently operating in the U.S. Dr. Slobodan Paessler specializes in viral pathogenesis and therapeutic agent development, and he and Dr. Cheng Huang’s laboratory most recently obtained a COVID-19 viral isolate and have established the infection cell model for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Sorrento is currently conducting preclinical development of multiple therapeutic candidates to treat COVID-19 across its proprietary platforms, including natural killer (NK) cell therapies, neutralizing antibodies (NAbs) and soluble recombinant fusion protein traps (COVIDTRAP^TM) to potentially inhibit the binding of SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein with host ACE2 receptors, thereby potentially preventing viral cell entry. SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes COVID-19.