In Vitro Assessment of Antimicrobial Activity - Task Order for Comprehensive Viral Screening Panel

The requested action awards a new task order to provide services to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases' (NIAID) preclinical services. The Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (DMID) plays a major role in NIAID's effort to develop medical products for human viral diseases other than AIDS. The task order will provide the service of testing new candidate drugs in in vitro assays to test their activity against viruses. Antiviral drugs help the body fight off harmful viruses and can ease symptoms and shorten the length of an infection. Some of these drugs can be broadly acting-that is, they can treat infections from different kinds of viruses. However, researchers have struggled to develop a broad-spectrum antiviral for many reasons, including that the proteins on the surface of viruses vary so much. Viral surface proteins also tend to change rapidly over time. As a result, existing antiviral medicines remain limited and work only against a few, very specific viral infections. This task order provides candidate antivirals broad testing against multiple viruses. Viruses can infect many different human organs. For viruses that infect lungs, in the United States, 1,190,000-1,510,000 hospitalizations and 89,000-121,000 deaths are associated with these viruses each year. The estimated yearly, national cost to treat infections caused by viruses that infect lungs is tens of billions of dollars. There is an urgent need for new drugs to treat viral infections. This task order allows drug developers to test their candidate drugs on a wide range of different viruses helps drug developers identify their target diseases. This is critical data that will impact the development path of a drug. These studies are an essential first step to provide proof-of-concept data to support applications for grant funding and to garner the attention of investors. If this request for a new task order is not approved then it will delay future access to promising new drugs for the treatment of viral diseases.