Research House To Develop Treatments for SARS, Bird Flu, More

SRI International, a nonprofit research and development organization, has been awarded a $56.9 million contract with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, to provide preclinical services for the development of drugs and antibodies for anti-infective therapeutics.

SRI will provide five years of support for the development of treatments for avian flu, SARS, West Nile virus, hepatitis, and biodefense pathogens and toxins. SRI will perform medicinal chemistry, custom drug synthesis, formulation, analytical chemistry, clinical manufacturing, microbiology and virology screening, pharmacokinetics, safety testing, and preparation of Investigational New Drug (IND) applications to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

"We are very excited to have won this important contract, which further establishes SRI as one of the foremost anti-infective contract research organizations in the United States," says Jon Mirsalis, Ph.D., D.A.B.T., managing director of SRI’s Biosciences Division and principal investigator for the program. "This major project, coupled with SRI’s basic research groups, demonstrates SRI’s capabilities to take projects from idea to IND stage."

In addition to this contract for anti-infective therapeutic development, SRI has worked for many years with NIAID’s Division of AIDS conducting safety, formulation, and clinical manufacturing projects, as well as with the NIAID biodefense safety, vaccine, and screening programs.

Find more medical information on topics that interest you through medical search engines that scour a variety of health resources for trusted medical information.

This was a sponsored post.