Focus Carolina: John Bamforth
October 26, 2020The Well
Headshot of Bamforth
John Bamforth oversees the Rapidly Emerging Antiviral Drug Discovery Initiative (READDI), a non-profit drug research and development organization that is part of the Eshelman Institute for Innovation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The mission: to find treatments for COVID-19 and to anticipate what treatments may be needed in future pandemics.
“The goal of READDI is to have five novel antivirals against three viral families through phase one testing, which is the safety testing that goes on in drug development, within five years,” he said.
To achieve this “stretch goal,” Bamforth and a team are working with a number of other universities and pharmaceutical companies to secure funding and find new treatments.
Bamforth credits READDI founders Nat Moorman and Mark Heise from the UNC School of Medicine, who work alongside Ralph Baric, who has joint appointments in the School of Medicine and Gillings School of Global Public Health, with making Carolina a leader in the study of emerging coronaviruses.
The three scientists have slightly different expertise in terms of knowledge of viral families, Bamforth said.
“As a combination, the three of them [are] pretty remarkable individuals, very driven to provide these sorts of solutions to the world. And they’re not only good on the therapeutics, which is exciting, but they’re also very good at building models for new diseases,” he said.
Bamforth joined the University in 2019 after almost 30 years with Eli Lilly and Company. He completed his bachelor of pharmacy degree at the University of Bath in Bath, England, and earned a doctorate at Aston University in Birmingham, England.
Learn more about how scientists are finding new treatments by listening to this week’s segments.
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Transcript of Focus Carolina: John Bamforth 1
Provost Bob Blouin
Welcome to Focus Carolina, an exclusive program sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’m Provost Bob Blouin and I’m excited to share this series of interviews with our Carolina faculty here on WCHL.
Host
As head of the Eshelman Institute for Innovation, John Bamforth is leading Carolina’s effort to find new antiviral treatments for the COVID-19 pandemic, and he’s looking ahead to be prepared for future pandemics.
Since arriving at UNC in 2019, Dr. Bamforth’s team has been working on another novel coronavirus that he anticipated will be coming someday. Appropriately, his team is named READDI.
Dr. John Bamforth
READDI is Rapidly Emerging Antiviral Drug Discovery Initiative. The challenge right now is we’re all in the middle of COVID-19, but unfortunately, what COVID-19 demonstrates is lack of preparedness for these types of events. We’re trying to work out why these novel viruses seem to be occurring more frequently. There’s a pretty good chance we’ll end up with one of these appearing again sometime in the future. And so the purpose of READDI, really with the virologists particularly at UNC, is trying to get ahead of this. So trying to put a strategic plan around being ready for one of these next challenges, and so the goal of READDI is to have five novel antivirals against three viral families through phase one testing, which is the safety testing that goes on in drug development within five years, which is a really significant stretch goal. We had to develop a vaccine once COVID-19 appeared.
So the science here, the trick that we’re trying to play here is what happens in a host cell when challenged by a novel virus. The virus can’t grow without a host cell, so we’re trying to look at what is the impact on the biology of the host cell when challenged by one of these viruses. If we can understand the biology and have a drug ready to go against the biology of what might happen in the host cell rather than attacking the virus directly, then we’ve got a chance of projecting one of these treatments that might cover an emerging virus that appears in the future. It’s a bit of a leap. It’s trying to understand the science from a bit of a different lens, but it is about the only way that you can project in this way and plan strategically for one of these events.
So it’s a 500 million dollar fundraise one way, shape or form to be able to do this. We’ve already had funding, obviously from our institute, from the University and from the state of North Carolina, but we still have a significant gap that we need to fill by doing that in a multitude of different ways to global effort through the lens of the university. So as we got into COVID-19 and we decided to double down on READDI, we went to many as 20 universities around the world and asked them if they wanted to get involved in the science effort. I don’t think anybody turned us down. They all basically saw the need and were willing to collaborate, which is great.
Host
To help with funding and the speed of production, Dr. Bamforth says READDI is also a commercial product.
Dr. Bamforth
We also talked to a number of pharmaceutical companies, I think 12 is the last number I remember off the top of my head. And again, we didn’t have anybody who said this is a bad idea. So we’ve already started projects with three pharmaceutical companies and I think we’ll bring those on board as we move forward. The feedback has been really good. Everybody understands the need, I think, because of what we’re all going through right now. I think everybody gets we’ve got to be in a better place than we’ve been for this go around. That’s why there’s so much energy around the concept right now.
The good news is there is a little bit of an example here that we were involved in at UNC. Everybody’s heard of Remdesivir, which is the antiviral that we’ve been using for emergency use from the FDA to treat patients with COVID-19. That actually came from some work, some collaboration between ourselves and Emory and some other folks at Gilead Pharmaceuticals. And Remdesivir was actually developed to treat Ebola many years ago when the Ebola outbreak came about. But it was sitting there on the shelf ready to go when COVID-19 appeared, the studies were done very rapidly and were demonstrated that Remdesivir helps patients recover more quickly than they would. And we basically were following that model with what we’re trying to do with READDI. We’re trying to get these drugs against a broader array of three viral families. We’re trying to do a similar sort of thing so that these drugs are sitting there ready to go as potential treatments if another of these viruses emerge. And obviously, Remdesivir is in the in the news because President Trump was put on Remdesivir.
Blouin
Thank you for listening to Focus Carolina, sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. To hear more interviews, visit chapelboro.com and click on 97.9 The Hill on demand or visit thewell.unc.edu.
Transcript of Focus Carolina: John Bamforth 2
Provost Bob Blouin
Welcome to Focus Carolina, an exclusive program sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’m Provost Bob Blouin and I’m excited to share this series of interviews with our Carolina faculty here on WCHL.
Host
As head of the Eshelman Institute for Innovation, John Bamforth is leading Carolina’s effort to find new antiviral treatments for the COVID-19 pandemic, and he’s looking ahead to be prepared for future pandemics.
Dr. Bamforth’s team studies multiple virus families, at least three directly related to COVID-19 and the Rapidly Emerging Antiviral Drug Discovery Initiative, or READDI.
Dr. John Bamforth
The three viral families—this is going to sound very technical—but coronaviruses, so COVID-19, the family COVID-19 comes from; flaviviruses and alphaviruses. Those are the three viral families. Now there are there are others, but we decided those were three that we would focus on. The science here is, particularly for the public, is sometimes hard to understand, and we understand that. The reality is, as we’re seeing in many examples, unfortunately, we’ve all had some sort of exposure to the challenge here. But we believe that you’re going to need and we’ve seen it with COVID-19, you’re going to need both vaccines, once one of these viruses emerges, [and] the treatments alongside those vaccines. The reality is vaccines tend not to be perfect. You know, not everybody that takes a vaccine is covered. You still get breakthroughs where patients get these diseases. And so when they do, you need to have the treatments like antivirals sitting on the shelf ready to go in the armamentarium to treat these diseases.
So, yes, we’ll still need vaccines, but we’ll also need treatments to go alongside that. We can play a really important role coordinating that effort around the world and we’re excited to do it. As I say, we’ve had lots of positive response to that because we’ve dug into talking to all these groups, you know, from universities to pharma, even the federal government. You know, we’ve had lots of good dialogue with all the folks that we’re hearing day in, day out from the federal government right now with Project Warp Speed. We’re working on campus with Project Warp Speed on COVID-19. We’ve got one of the best animal models for COVID-19. We’ve got so much expertise on the UNC campus. We think we can do a good job to coordinate this type of effort around the world.
Host
Dr. Bamforth credits READDI founders Nat Moorman and Mark Heise from the UNC School of Medicine, who work alongside Dr. Ralph Baric, in making Carolina a leader in the study of emerging coronaviruses.
Dr. Bamforth
The beauty that they bring to it is they all have slightly different expertise in terms of knowledge of viral families. Dr. Baric’s expertise is very firmly in the domain of coronaviruses, and he is world renowned. Mark and Nat have expertise in the other families we talked about. As a combination, the three of them [are] pretty remarkable individuals, very driven to provide these sorts of solutions to the world. And they’re not only good on the therapeutics, which is exciting, but they’re also very good at building models for new diseases.
Dr. Baric published a scientific paper recently that shared, I think, one of the best animal models now of COVID-19 so it can act as a very helpful screen for therapeutics of COVID-19, and he’s been inundated with requests from around the world to use his animal model to see if these novel therapeutics can work in COVID-19.
One of the things that has happened over the last nine months or so as COVID-19 emerged…the scientific effort around novel therapeutics and the vaccines, of course, has been remarkable. There are over 700 vaccines and therapeutics being developed for COVID-19 in various manifestations. Dr. Baric has been in pretty significant demand because of his expertise and because of some of the models that he’s built. I have to say on the whole, the behavior of folks on campus at UNC, at other universities, pharma, when we’re talking to folks in government at a grassroots level, we’ve had no issues talking to folks like this, and they’ve all understood the challenge. They’re all committed to come up with solutions for patients. And so it’s been actually quite reassuring to see. I think people have that purpose ahead of them and are excited to try and come up with solutions, solutions for the long term. None of us want to be living in the Zoom world for the rest of our days. That’s what’s been a great motivation to bring people together on a project like READDI to be focused on getting to a better, longer term solution.
Blouin
Thank you for listening to Focus Carolina, sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. To hear more interviews, visit chapelboro.com and click on 97.9 The Hill on demand or visit thewell.unc.edu.