Infectious Disease Screening Platforms

National Center For Advancing Translational Sciences

Investigators

Abstract

During this period, in response to the he ongoing outbreak of Mpox, we have work on a Poxvirus Therapeutic Discovery project to develop high throughput assays with Vaccinia Virus (VACV) and screen internal and external (collaborator) chemical libraries and identify therapeutic agents to be used as treatment. We aim to develop high throughput assays using Vaccinia Virus (VACV) in biologically relevant cells and screen NCATS chemical diversity libraries including a new library curated for pox activity for new therapeutics. We will also develop assays in primary human cells to test potential therapeutic compounds in models of severe disease such as encephalitis. We also worked in the development of Influenza A (IAV) neutralizing antibody assay using reporter IAV to test neutralizing antibodies. In collaboration with the NCATS 3DTBL, we have also shown that these neural spheroids can be used to investigate infectivity by neurotropic viruses and have shown that many of these viruses affect neural activity and there are compounds that prevent the neurological effects without prevent viral replication. We have established a collaboration with Victoria Baxter at Texas Biomedical Research Institute to use PFC-like neuronal spheroid models to study how nsP1 mutations affect CHIKV replication in CNS tissue models.