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Preparing for tomorrow’s pandemics today:
Accelerating therapeutic development with preclinical models of coronavirus pathogenesis
Part of the BTEC Spring 2021 Seminar Series
Friday, April 23, 2021
10:40–11:30 a.m.
Speaker: Timothy Sheahan, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Epidemiology
Gillings School of Global Public Health
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Join us at 10:40 a.m. Friday, April 23 for a presentation by Dr. Timothy Sheahan that considers what we can do today to prepare for tomorrow’s pandemics.
Coronaviruses (CoV) often jump from one host to another to cause new diseases, and at least five novel CoV have emerged in the past 20 years. We are all currently experiencing the consequence of novel CoV emergence and the devastation the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic has caused to human public and economic health. What can we do to prepare for tomorrow’s pandemics today? The generation of robust in vitro and in vivo models of CoV disease are essential to accelerate the development of drugs and vaccines. More specifically, if we can develop antiviral strategies that are effective against the CoV that we know about today, those strategies are likely to work against CoV that may emerge in the future.
About the presenter
Dr. Sheahan is an NIH-funded virologist working at the host-pathogen interface to develop new methods of viral control. He earned a bachelor’s degree in microbiology from the University of New Hampshire in 1999 and a doctorate in microbiology/immunology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008. As part of his graduate education, he joined the laboratory of Dr. Ralph Baric to study how the recently emerged SARS coronavirus had jumped from wild animals into humans. After a postdoc on hepatitis C virus with 2020 Nobel Laureate Dr. Charles M. Rice at the Rockefeller University, he became an investigator at GlaxoSmithKline in 2014 and worked to develop host-targeting small molecules as antivirals. In 2015, he became an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. His current research is focused on developing antiviral therapies to treat emerging coronavirus and developing models to better understand chronic viral infections of the liver. Dr. Sheahan and colleagues, in collaboration with Gilead Sciences and Emory Institute of Drug Discovery, have accelerated the preclinical development of several broad-spectrum small-molecule antiviral drugs, one of which has been approved by the FDA to treat COVID-19, remdesivir. Another, molnupiravir, is in phase 2/3 clinical trials. In addition to small-molecule drugs, Sheahan and colleagues have performed preclinical development on pegylated lambda interferon to treat COVID-19; human clinical data thus far is very promising.