COVID-19 researchers awarded funds

The San Antonio Partnership for Precision Therapeutics continues to boost the work of local scientists with research grants to study COVID-19.

In April, SAPPT funded University of Texas at San Antonio microbiologist Karl Klose’s research testing his “rabbit fever” vaccine on the coronavirus.

Liz Tullis, the partnership’s executive director, said Thursday that three additional projects will receive $200,000 each to learn more about the novel coronavirus.

The four projects involve more than 20 researchers who work in labs at UT Health San Antonio, the Texas Biomedical Research Institute, the University of Texas at San Antonio and the Southwest Research Institute.

The research proposals considered are among several pitched that came with a promise of producing early results, given the severity of the public health crisis.

COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has wrecked havoc on the American economy and led to more than 134,000 deaths in the U.S. In San Antonio, more than 170 people have died after contracting the virus.

“This virus causes disease with varied effects, from asymptomatic and mild symptoms for some infected persons to more severe symptoms that require hospitalization and intubation in others. And of course, in some unfortunate cases, the disease may lead to the patient’s death,” said Adam Hamilton, president and CEO of SwRI.

“COVID-19 seems to impact some parts of our community harder than others,” he said.

Diako Ebrahimi and his team at Texas Biomed are studying the role of the protein FURIN in COVID-19 and why it might be deadlier in certain individuals, especially those with underlying cardiovascular conditions.

“While we’re talking about COVID-19 specifically in this research, the implications are much farther reaching,” said Dr. Larry Schlesinger, president and CEO of Texas Biomed. “We can use what we learn here and apply that knowledge to combating the next novel coronavirus, HIV and other infectious diseases. This study has a true precision therapy goal, as it aims to understand why certain individuals have greater severity of disease and why specific underlying conditions affect outcomes.”

Another research team, led by Dmitri Ivanov, a biochemistry and structural biology professor at UT

Health San Antonio, is working to identify how people can bolster their natural immune system to counter COVID-19.

The goal is to identify antiviral compounds either among existing Food and Drug Administration-approved treatments or in libraries of druglike molecules that could effectively combat the ability of the virus to evade a person’s immune defenses.

Another UT Health San Antonio professor in the biochemistry and structural biology department received funding for his project, according to the announcement.

Yogesh Gupta and his team are studying how the virus evades the human immune system, by mimicking the host RNA and growing inside the body.

By understanding this process, he says, the goal is to develop novel inhibitors that can block specific pathways that permit the virus to replicate inside the host cell and could pave the way to developing a new class of drugs to fight COVID-19, as well as other emerging coronaviruses.

This most recent round of funding was made possible because of USAA, which has pledged to donate $1 million to organizations fighting COVID-19, and a nearly $100,000 donation from the San Antonio Area Foundation.