IRIC - Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer

Published on avril 24, 2020

We are excited to underscore the commitment made by the team headed by Michael Tyers, Principal Investigator in IRIC’s Systems Biology and Synthetic Biology Research Unit. In collaboration with the teams led by Gerard Wright and Matthew Miller, both of whom are Principal Investigators at McMaster University, the mandate of Michael Tyers’ lab is to identify new therapeutic targets in order to provide better treatment for patients suffering from COVID-19. The project also includes the collaboration of the laboratory headed by Anne Marinier, Principal Investigator and Director of Medicinal Chemistry at IRIC, and involves the Drug Discovery Unit that she is in charge of.

In more concrete terms, the teams will use their expertise in the fields of functional genomics, CRISPR-based screening, virology and drug discovery to quickly identify candidate therapeutic compounds to fight the type of virus causing COVID-19 disease.

If this research proves to be promising, it may also enable us to develop more effective therapies to fight new coronavirus-associated diseases that could emerge in the future.

The team’s research efforts on COVID-19 are supported by a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).