PolyBio Research Foundation has announced the second phase of its Long Covid Research Consortium (LCRC), including the distribution of $15 million to fund research and clinical trials. With its new phase of research, PolyBio expands the consortium's international reach, adding teams based in France, the UK, and Sweden.
Over a dozen institutions globally participate in PolyBio's consortium, including leading scientists from Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Mount Sinai, Yale, and the University of California San Francisco (UCSF).
In distributing its second round of funds, PolyBio will invest in deepening research on persistence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the tissue of long COVID patients, covered in Nature. "Persistence of the virus in the gut is one of the biggest leads in the space," says Dr Sara Cherry, the John W. Eckman Professor of Medical Science in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, whose team is working to identify drug combinations that can eliminate virus in gut tissue.
PolyBio will also fund UCSF to launch the world's first programme to collect comprehensive tissue samples from long COVID patients. "The UCSF team contains people who made HIV/AIDS a treatable disease. These researchers rapidly pivoted into Long COVID at the outset of the pandemic," says PolyBio President Dr Amy Proal.
Pictured above is consortium member and PolyBio Co-Founder Dr Michael VanElzakker of Harvard University analysing platelet blood cells from long COVID patients.
PolyBio's second phase of projects also includes funding for clinical trials evaluating HIV antivirals for long COVID, a top priority of patients. "If HIV antivirals have a positive impact on long COVID, the ability to improve the lives of patients is that much closer at hand, as these drugs are affordable and safety tested," says Dr David Putrino, who serves as the Nash Family Director of Mount Sinai's Cohen Center for Recovery From Complex Chronic Illnesses (CoRE), which will direct the clinical trials.