54989Accelerated Coronavirus clearance immunotherapyClosedFeasibility StudiesInnovate UKThe COVID-19 pandemic is the 3rd-known coronaviral-disease with an alarmingly-high transmission rate. These incidences will keep returning and we must be prepared with innovative technologies to combat future epidemics/pandemics. Vaccinations are the gold-standard but this may not always be successful and can have adverse effects and/or lead to incomplete protection. Antibody-Drug Conjugates (ADCs) are a form of targeted chemotherapy using immunoglobulins to deliver cytotoxic chemotherapy drugs (payloads) to tumours. Antikor are developing the next evolution of this concept using much smaller antibody-fragments that can penetrate tumours more effectively, clear from the body more rapidly whilst delivering more payload due to our proprietary high-loading technology. We propose to apply our FDC platform by harnessing these key features to develop a therapeutic drug that could rapidly reduce COVID-19 viral-load over a matter of hours thereby reducing disease severity, intensive-care-unit hospitalisation and death. Antikor has proprietary antibody-fragment libraries with the expertise to discover antibodies to practically any target, has identified suitable 'payloads' and has all the resources and experience to develop anti-viral FDCs. There is no precedent for this novel drug class but there is a strong case from the supporting data showing a correlation between viral load and disease severity. The technical approach (6-months) will be to use phage-display technology to discover antibody-fragments against COVID-19, with candidates emerging from Antikor's library already pre-designed to form stable, highly-loaded drug-conjugates. Leads will be candidates for more detailed biological studies including rodent models of coronaviral infection/clearance, which will be done in collaboration with identified respiratory virologists. This approach acts to reduce viral load more rapidly than drugs like hydroxychloroquine or replication inhibitors and could be more effective than conventional neutralising antibodies due to the clearance mechanisms harnessed and faster tissue perfusion into critical organs such as the lung and kidneys. If successful, Antikor has networks to commercialise this therapy which enables patient benefits to be realised sooner and add value to the Company through a broader technology proposition. EXTENSION FOR IMPACT We wish to change the scope to extend the project's impact by setting and completing further deliverables that will maximise the chances of Antikor's COVID-19 FDC becoming a viable and beneficial therapy. In the past 4 months, we have made excellent progress to discover many COVID-19 recognising antibodies and have started to make conjugates that will be tested as drug product candidates. We wish to conduct more development work to include manufacturing assessment so that viable candidates will make better commercial 'products' and importantly, we wish to conduct a commercial market assessment for COVID-19 therapies at all stages of development. All of these additional tasks will de-risk the project and increase the chances of developing a commercially-viable product to treat COVID-19 infected patients