While vaccines have emerged as a central tool in battling the COVID-19 pandemic, the SARS-CoV-2 virus continues to fuel waves of infections.
COVID-19 antivirals could play a vital role in managing the disease in the future, and a handful are currently in use in the U.S.
One possible way to accelerate the development of additional antivirals for COVID-19 and other respiratory viral infections is the availability of more accurate preclinical models.
The nonprofit engineering innovation company Draper has released a study showing the power of combining human tissue models based on an organ-on-chip platform in a dynamic tissue microenvironment with input from microbiologists and bioengineers.
In essence, the Cambridge, Massachusetts–based company has developed a human lung model known as PREDICT96-ALI that can gauge the efficacy of SARS-CoV-2 drugs, including antivirals.
In the research published on the pre-print server bioRxiv, researcher…