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The National Centre for Science has closed the competition for research into COVID-19. Professor Marcin Drąg and Łukasz Berlicki, PhD, Dsc, Eng. from the Faculty of Chemistry are to receive over 2 million PLN for their projects.
Announced in late March, the competition was intended for scientists working towards understanding the mechanism of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus’ behaviour, as well as working on improving diagnostic tests, searching for new drugs, and mitigating the social effects of the pandemic.
Researchers submitted 262 applications for a total of more than PLN 140 million, and funding worth more than PLN 12 million was granted to 19 projects. The winners include Professor Marcin Drąg, who received the largest amount of funding in the whole competition, and Łukasz Berlicki, PhD, Dsc, Eng. from WUST’s Faculty of Chemistry.
Professor Marcin Drąg received a grant of 1,590,000 PLN for the project named "Retargeting known drugs towards proteases participating in the development of the COVID-19 disease".
The aim of the project conducted by Professor Marcin Drąg is to search the library of several thousand drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and other drug agencies for five proteases (ACE2, TMPRSS2, cathepsins B and L, and SARS-CoV-2-PLpro) to find molecules that may inhibit any of these proteases involved in the SARS-CoV-2 invasion and development of COVID-19. When identified, such molecules will immediately provide information on candidates for drug retargeting.
The information obtained will be immediately used by doctors for research on drug retargeting, as well as by virologists to work on models of viruses that will help us better understand their action.
The other awarded WUST researcher, Łukasz Berlicki, PhD, Dsc, Eng, will receive a grant of 465,600 PLN for the project "Peptide foldamers based inhibitors of the impact of human ACE2 and protein S from SARS-CoV-2". The main aim of the research is to develop new compounds from the group of peptide foldamers capable of inhibiting the impact of human ACE2 and S-protein from SARS-Cov-2 virus.
