Carterra Inc., a high-throughput antibody screening and characterization tools company, and La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI), entered an agreement that will leverage Carterra’s LSA platform to screen hundreds of antibodies in just a few days allowing Coronavirus Immunotherapy Consortium (CoVIC) to move therapeutic candidates to the clinic as early as this summer.
 
LJI has been awarded a $1.73 million grant by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to establish a Coronavirus Immunotherapy Consortium (CoVIC) as part of the foundation’s global efforts to stem the current coronavirus outbreak.  Antibody therapies are often the first novel therapies advanced for an emerging infectious disease.
 
Headquartered at LJI, CoVIC will serve as a clearinghouse to understand which antibodies are most effective against the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and to accelerate the research pipeline to provide immunotherapeutics.
 
This effort is being funded as part of the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator launched in early March by the Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and Mastercard. The Accelerator provides fast and flexible funding at key stages of the development process to de-risk the pathway for drugs and biologics to prevent and treat COVID-19.