Viral infections have posed a persistent threat to our health throughout history. The global pandemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) impacted heavily on the world economy and health care systems, with millions of deaths recorded.
To make matters worse, there are many other serious viral pathogens including influenza, which can be transmitted through similar mechanisms and have overlapping clinical features with SARS-CoV-2.
Due to a number of complex factors including systemic barriers, viral pandemics such as influenza have disproportionately impacted Māori and Pacific Peoples with estimated mortality rates over seven times higher for Māori compared to non-Māori during the 1918 influenza pandemic.
Currently, we have very few approved antivirals or vaccines available for the many viral pathogens that threaten our health. For the few viruses where we do have approved antivirals available, we are facing increasing drug-resistance and constant viral evolution continues to create new challenges to ensure our vaccines and antivirals remain effective.
Therefore, it is essential to develop new safe and effective antiviral therapies. We need to use our scientific tools and local expertise to develop our own therapeutic strategies to actively protect our own people. Additionally, we need broad-spectrum antivirals in our toolkit to use as a first line of defence against any emerging novel viruses to give us time to develop and test vaccines for prevention.
Our team has extensive experience and a long record of drug development from initial chemistry right through to human clinical trials. Therefore, this is a therapeutic innovation project that can build a platform to establish Aotearoa New Zealand-unique antiviral therapies against a wide range of viruses that can rapidly be clinically tested in humans.
Our project has Māori co-leadership and co-design and aims to develop safe and effective broad-spectrum antivirals to combat significant viral pathogens with pandemic potential such as SARS-CoV-2, influenza and future novel or re-emerging viral threats.
This will help to protect against excess morbidity and mortality from viral diseases that impact on all our populations including Māori and Pacific Peoples in Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond. The fact that it has potential efficacy against a wide range of viruses means it also gives this country a way to react quickly potential viral pandemics now and in the future.
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