On Mar. 30, 2020, the La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) announced it had been awarded a $1.73 million grant by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to establish a Coronavirus Immunotherapy Consortium (CoVIC) as part of the foundation’s global efforts to stem the tide of the current coronavirus outbreak. Antibody therapies are often the first novel therapies advanced for an emerging infectious disease.

Headquartered at LJI, CoVIC will serve as a clearinghouse to understand which antibodies are most effective against the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and to accelerate the research pipeline to provide immunotherapeutics in order to protect vulnerable individuals from severe manifestations of COVID-19 in all parts of the world including low-resource settings.

This effort is being funded as part of the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator launched in early March by the Gates Foundation, Wellcome and Mastercard. The Accelerator provides fast and flexible funding at key stages of the development process to de-risk the pathway for drugs and biologics to prevent and treat COVID-19. The effort is led by Erica Ollmann Saphire, Ph.D., a professor in LJI’s Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research, who draws on her broad research experience guiding the development of antibody drugs and galvanizing a global research coalition that helped define which therapeutic antibodies effectively combat disease in humans infected with Ebola virus.

Antibody-based immunotherapies can also treat those who have already become sick, lessening disease and improving survival. The most potent antibodies will provide crucial insights to help guide the development of vaccines to stop the current outbreak and protect against future pandemics.

Unlike your everyday, common-cold-causing coronavirus, every few years a new variant of coronavirus emerges that ravages the body’s organs and the new disease—dubbed COVID-19 by the World Health Organization—is no exception in its most severe manifestation.

The new coronavirus strain is genetically closely related to SARS-CoV, and therefore has been named SARS-CoV-2. For most patients, SARS-CoV-2 causes flu-like symptoms that start out with a fever and cough that progresses to pneumonia. But in the most severe cases, immune cells flood the lungs trying to clear away the damage and repair lung tissue. Normally, this process is highly regulated but when the immune system spirals out of control, healthy tissue is attacked causing even more damage, which can result in respiratory failure highlighting the urgent need for therapeutics that can treat critically ill patients.

CoVIC is an academic-industry, non-profit collaborative research effort that will bring together scientists from around the world and enable them to share and evaluate candidate antibodies side-by-side in a blinded, multidisciplinary analysis. Together, they will identify ideal therapeutic combinations, the assays that best predict efficacy, and the features that provide protection.