ARC’s response to COVID-19

‍COVID-19 heath crisis globally has infected over thirty-five million people and claimed more than a million lives across the globe, just in less than one year of its arrival. This is an escalating and unprecedented crisis that has never been witnessed at a global scale and calls for drastic measures to be taken in real-time. An immediate need for addressing this crisis includes building therapeutics to counter the virus.

‍At present, there are no FDA approved antivirals or vaccines for coronaviruses such as SARS-CoV and MERS that can be tried against novel SARS-CoV-2. The development of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine would require 12-18 months. Current treatment strategies are, therefore, focused on repurposing of already approved drugs for off-label use, notably broad-spectrum antivirals. Due to the enormity of COVID-19 pandemic and non-availability of any tested therapeutic option, there is an urgent need to rapidly develop pharmaceutical countermeasures against SARS-CoV-2. 

COVID-19 therapeutics
ARC scientists are developing novel therapeutic strategies against SARs-Cov2. Importantly, our focus is to be able to develop effective therapeutics in a short period of time. An effort led by ARC Labs founder, Dr. Chatterjee involves the recently developed novel platform called Facile Accelerated Rapid Therapeutic (FAST) that can enable rapid development of effective nucleic acid-based therapies for a variety of diseases and emergent pathogenic threats within a time scale of hours to days. Molecules developed by FAST, called FASTmers, are being developed to target the virus as well as host for viral suppression. In addition to developing the therapeutic candidate for addressing the current crisis, we are developing a robust pandemic response for future threats. At ARC Labs we will develop the ecosystem to move these inventions through drug-discovery and development pipeline to enable translation in a timely manner. Support our research through your donations.

COVID-19 Diagnostics
‍ARC scientists are developing detection kits that will allow us identify SARS-Cov2 virus using novel nanotechnology and synthetic biology approaches. We aim at reducing sample and time, cost, and increasing sensitivity and scalability. Importantly, in preparation for future threats, our focus is to be able to build a technology pipeline where you can create a new diagnostic tool in response to a new pathogen in a short period of time. Support our research through your donations.

Teaming up with other international collaborations COV-IRT
‍The ARC team is also collaborating with the COVID-19 International Research Team (COVIRT) network, an international community of scientists working on COVID-19, to develop novel treatments. In particular, we are collaborating to understand what host factors may be important for the spread and colonization of the human host by the SARS-Cov2 virus