SOM Biotech has been granted €340,000.00 from the Center for Industrial Technological Development (CDTI, Spain), within the extraordinary call for grants for R&D projects to face the COVID-19 health emergency.
With these funds, SOM Biotech will initiate clinical trials for the development of a new eravacycline-based therapy for the treatment of COVID-19. Eravacycline is an antibiotic, of the tetracycline family, that inhibits the main protease of SARS-CoV-2 and the replication of the virus in infected cell.
Eravacycline is the most promising of three drug candidates that SOM Biotech has validated in vitro as new therapy for the treatment of COVID-19 in collaboration with the Department of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences led by Professor Dong-Hae Shin of Ewha University Womans University from South Korea. The clinical trial in humans is planned to begin after the summer in the United States and Europe.
Raul Insa, CEO of SOM Biotech: “The selection of our project by the CDTI is a recognition of our drug research and development activity, which is currently of special relevance due to the health emergency caused by COVID-19. This project highlights our contribution to technological innovation that derives from the use of our artificial intelligence-based platform to validate drug candidates with high standards of safety and efficacy in record time (in this particular case in just four months). We plan to start clinical trials in the short term as we aim to offer a COVID-19 treatment as soon as possible”.
