VCU Leads Research Project To Increase Access To AIDS Treatments
Virginia Commonwealth University has announced that the institution, along with several other research universities, has received a $4.4 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in order to develop affordable access to AIDS treatments. VCU will be collaborating with researchers from the University of Washington, Florida State University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the project, which is titled the Medicine for All Initiative. The collaboration will specifically examine ways of making the AIDS “first line” AIDS therapy nevirapine more available across the globe.
The schools will be focusing on developing new manufacturing methods for the drug, in addition to new synthetic methods. In particular, the University of Washington team is working on establishing process and quality control factors for continuous flow reactors. The teams at FSU and MIT are currently examining synthetic strategies to make pharma ingredients manufacturing more affordable.
The collaboration will be led by B. Frank Gupton, PhD and VCU School of Engineering research professor and chair of the Department of Chemical and Life Science Engineering. Gupton commented on the new collaborative agreement between the institutions. “The objective of this effort is to identify a manufacturing route leading to nevirapine that utilizes the lowest cost raw materials and ultra-efficient manufacturing tools. We anticipate this approach will not only lead to a new API (active pharmaceutical ingredients) manufacturing process paradigm that will reduce the cost of nevirapine, but may also be applied to other important drug targets, as well.” In particular, Gupton believes that continuous flow technology will be the answer to improving the quality and cost of this drug.
Ultimately, the researchers believe that making it cheaper to manufacture AIDS drugs will also improve the outlook for other drugs in demand in third world countries. Tyler McQuade, PhD and Florida State chemistry professor, said that reducing the price of drugs distributed by public health groups would mean that those groups could increase their annual allotments.