Sorrento Therapeutics, Inc. announced it has entered into a research testing agreement with The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston for the preclinical testing of Sorrento’s COVID-19 therapeutic product candidates. Dr. Slobodan Paessler, DVM, Ph.D., John S. Dunn Distinguished Chair in Biodefense and scientific director of the Animal Biosafety Laboratory 3 at the Galveston National Laboratory, will be supervising the research.
The work will be performed in Dr. Paessler’s laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), one of only two maximum containment laboratories on a university campus in the United States and one of just a few such Biosafety Level 4 (BSL4) laboratories currently operating in the U.S. Dr. Paessler specializes in viral pathogenesis and therapeutic agent development, and he and Dr. Cheng Huang’s laboratory most recently obtained a COVID-19 viral isolate and have established the infection cell model for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Dr. Henry Ji, CEO and Chairman of Sorrento, stated, “Dr. Paessler is a world-renowned expert in infectious diseases and the development of animal models to test new therapeutic candidates, and his team has direct access to one of the few high containment laboratories in the country. We are committed to advancing Sorrento’s proprietary COVID-19 product candidates as quickly and safely as possible with the hope that they can offer effective, life-saving care to patients and healthcare providers worldwide.”
Sorrento is currently conducting preclinical development of multiple therapeutic candidates to treat COVID-19 across its proprietary platforms, including natural killer (NK) cell therapies, neutralizing antibodies (NAbs) and soluble recombinant fusion protein traps (COVIDTRAPTM) to potentially inhibit the binding of SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein with host ACE2 receptors, thereby potentially preventing viral cell entry. SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes COVID-19.