DARPA taps Wyss technology to ID drugs for COVID-19 treatment
The Wyss Institute and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have signed an agreement worth up to $16 million over the next year to use Wyss technologies to identify and test FDA-approved drugs that could be repurposed to prevent or treat COVID-19. Specifically, DARPA will use the computational drug-discovery pipelines and human organ chip technologies developed by the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. The team, led by Wyss Founding Director Donald Ingber, has already found multiple approved compounds that show promise against the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. Many more drugs and lead compounds are being tested in high-throughput cell-based assays with native CoV-2 virus in the lab of Matthew Frieman, associate professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. The most promising drugs are being transferred to the lab of Benjamin tenOever at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount...