PRiME faculty members Dev Sidhu and Keith Pardee are among the select researchers awarded federal grant funding to address the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak. The two projects highlight the novel treatments and diagnostics being developed by researchers within the PRiME community.
In an emergency call for applications, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), in partnership with other federal agencies, awarded 47 grants to research teams providing $26.7 million over two years. As noted by a statement from the CIHR, “the diversity of research ideas and quality of science was impressive”. This is especially true when one considers that researchers were given only a nine-day window to submit their research responses. “When fast-breaking challenges strike, every moment counts, and it is at times like these that we see the altruistic spirit of our Canadian researchers. We have often witnessed the community’s passion for science and dedication in addressing such global and national crises, and those qualities were once again on full display during this public health emergency”.
The funded projects span two main research areas: medical countermeasures and social and policy countermeasures. The awards to Drs. Sidhu and Pardee fall into the former category which focuses on determining transmission, development of diagnostics for detection and surveillance, and the development and validation of potential vaccines.
Dr. Dev Sidhu’s lab in the Donnelly Centre focuses on the development of synthetic antibodies as novel therapeutics for many diseases including cancer. In recent years, he and his team have used custom protein engineering to develop novel anti-viral therapies for SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and MERS (middle East Respiratory Syndrome), similar epidemic-causing viruses. Dr. Wei Zhang, a former postdoctoral fellow in the Sidhu lab and currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Guelph, will collaborate with Sidhu along with Drs. Roman Melnyk (Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto), Brian Mark (University of Manitoba), and Marjolein Kikkert (Leiden University, the Netherlands). The team, which has been awarded $886,090, aims to have novel lead candidate drugs within the two years of the project. Read more about Dr. Sidhu’s COVID-19 work, as featured in the Toronto Star, here.
Dr. Keith Pardee’s lab is based in the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and uses synthetic biology to develop portable, affordable diagnostics for healthcare. He developed and tested this type of diagnostic technology on the Zika virus and it has been used in patient trials in high risk countries including Brazil, Ecuador, and Colombia. Dr. Pardee will be developing the COVID-19 diagnostic with clinical collaborators from Vietnam and Brazil, who will focus on patient validation of the portable kit. The team, which has been awarded $1,000,000, will focus on creating deployable diagnostics for the virus, including 1) a lab-in-a-box for surge capacity testing, 2) a “pop-up capacity” to manufacture the test on-site, and 3) a point-of-need test for rapid screening at airports or cruise ships. Read more about Dr. Pardee’s work, featured on Global News, here.