'Vac­cines alone are in­suf­fi­cien­t': Mer­ck, Ali­gos work with aca­d­e­m­ic ex­perts to find Covid an­tivi­rals as part of $65M NIH grant

Mer­ck is throw­ing its weight be­hind a new con­sor­tium of aca­d­e­m­ic, non­prof­it and biotech sci­en­tists to dis­cov­er oral an­tivi­rals that can fight Covid-19 — and pan­dem­ic virus­es of the fu­ture.

The NIH and the NI­AID will pro­vide $65 mil­lion over three years to fund the The Met­ro­pol­i­tan An­tiVi­ral Drug Ac­cel­er­a­tor, or MAV­DA, as it works to find and test small mol­e­cule drugs to tar­get coro­n­avirus­es. With an em­pha­sis on SARS-CoV-2 and one or more se­lect RNA virus­es with pan­dem­ic po­ten­tial, the goal is to make oral treat­ments that can be giv­en in an out­pa­tient set­ting.

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