Hyderabad: In order to accelerate the development of potential treatments and vaccines for coronavirus, the National Institutes of Health has announced to bring together researchers and 16 pharmaceutical companies for a coordinated research response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The new initiative known as Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) partnership will focus on prioritising research into drugs and vaccines that are having high near-term potential.
"Now is the time to come together with unassailable objectivity to swiftly advance the development of the most promising vaccine and therapeutic candidates that can help end the COVID-19 global pandemic," Francis Collins, the NIH director, said in a statement.
The collaboration will be spearheaded by NIH and will include the Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency.
It will standardise the methods and models that researchers are using to test COVID-19 compounds. High-level laboratory facilities will also be provided to the researchers. Finally, it would establish one joint control arm to be shared among all clinical trials, the NIH said in a press release.
It will also help in determining which medicine should be prioritised for further research and which drugs shouldn't.
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