Antiviral & Antimicrobial Countermeasures Discovery and Development Core

PROJECT ABSTRACT The proposed Antiviral & Antimicrobial Countermeasures Discovery & Development Core (herein abbreviated as A2CD2C) will facilitate biomedical research targeted toward the discovery and/or development of countermeasures for prophylactic or therapeutic treatment of human biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) pathogens or BSL-2 pathogens that mandate select agent control. The A2CD2C will enable this research using state-of-the-art equipment for small molecule (1) screening, (2) imaging, (3) liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LCMS/MS) services and (4) histology. The core will be housed within the UTHSC Regional Biocontainment Laboratory (RBL) in BSL-3 space. The A2CD2C is significant in that it provides an efficient, integrated, comprehensive platform that will facilitate studies from the initial discovery phase through pre-clinical development within BSL-3 containment. The A2CD2C is unique within the RBL network in its focus on providing LC-MS studies for infected, treated animal tissues in BSL-3 to provide much needed information of the site of exposure of the therapeutic at the site of infection and thereby providing important pharmacodynamic information required for preclinical assessment. The major mission of the A2CD2C is to maintain, improve and expand our RBL support services in drug discovery and development with a focus on drug pharmacodynamics in terms of how and how much drug exposure impacts pathogen survival. We propose three objectives to achieve herein: Objective 1. To maintain A2CD2C support services in drug discovery and development; Objective 2. To improve A2CD2C support services in drug discovery and development; and Objective 3. To expand A2CD2C support services in imaging in drug discovery and development.