Breaking New Ground Through Collaboration: ICAV and FAV

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By Chris Rogers and Shawn Lawrence

“The International Consortium on Anti-Virals (ICAV) has been in existence for 5 years, and the office of the International Secretariat of the Foundation on Antivirals (FAV) was opened in April 2009,” said ICAV co-founder and Foundation Scientific Director, Dr. Michel Chrétien. “These two complementary organizations pursue a similar goal with the same attitude.”

“Do you remember SARS, which struck Toronto in 2003?” he asked.

How could you not?

“For that matter, it could have struck the whole of Canada. Fortunately, a good quarantine policy kept it confined to Toronto.”

It was the outbreak of SARS that spurred the creation of ICAV.

“Academics like Jeremy Carver from Toronto and I realized that:

     A) there was no drug to treat the infection; and,

     B) there was little in the research pipeline in terms of antivirals,” said Chrétien.

We saw the dangerous gap for future epidemics, and that is when we had the spark of an idea that led both Jeremy and me to gather together a group of Canadian scientists and ask ourselves - “what can we do as scientists and medical researchers?” The answer was to create a collaborative network. Within a few months, we assembled a group of leading scientists that was much bigger than we had expected at the outset.”

The story moves quickly from there.

“We moved rapidly and within months, our friends from Europe and Asia requested to join the Canadian consortium, so it was that we became an international consortium,” Chrétien explained. “We now have a network of 250 scientists from 24 countries who are in constant touch via ICAF and FAV.”

While ICAV was founded to discover and develop anti-viral therapies for neglected and emerging diseases and to ensure their accessibility to all those in need, FAV, whose International Secretariat is located in Montréal, is tasked with the mission of raising funds to develop and make available, at reasonable cost, new anti-viral medicines for humanity.

With such an important mandate, it comes as little surprise that FAV is headquartered in Montréal.

“Why in Québec?” asks Chrétien. “There are two major reasons, the first is the strong support we received from the Government of Québec and Montréal International, and the second is that, in the area of medical research in general and biotech in particular, Québec has always been very active. It is also worth mentioning that McGill University, the University of Montréal, and the University of Québec are all located in Montréal with a large concentration of biotech and academic research. The city also is also home to the head offices of many international corporations.”

Chrétien asserts that the strengths of Québec’s biotech industry complement FAVs mandate perfectly. Since antivirals are grounded in the results of academia, being headquartered near such a high concentration of medical academia makes perfect sense.

Chrétien clarifies the ICAV/FAV relationship in these terms.

“FAV and ICAV work in close partnership, but it is ICAV that develops the drugs, with financial support from the federal government and the government of Ontario.

FAV’s role is to complement drug development by fundraising around the world. FAV’s five-year fundraising goal is $100 million worldwide.”

The ICAV concept may seem complicated, but Chrétien describes it simply as networking.

“ICAV is an international network of scientists,” he said. “The idea was born in Canada because SARS happened to strike in this country, but it is also because in Canada we are used to talking and collaborating with one another across vast distances. We are also capable of exporting worldwide this capacity to network effectively in the area of medical research. When SARS struck, it brought home that we needed it to fill the ‘gap’ or absence of antivirals. This is true for HIV, H1N1 and for other viral infections affecting mankind.”

H1N1 is expected to hit the world hard this year and we worry about its repercussions should our current vaccines prove ineffective.

“Of course, there is Tamiflu, but Tamiflu is the only option currently available, there are no alternatives. If the vaccine is not good enough, there will be a critical need for more antivirals,” he warns. “But, even if it is good enough, we will still need antivirals to act as a complement, since vaccines don’t work all the time. And, there are no guarantees how well they will work this fall. Also, it must be made clear that there are patients for whom antivirals offer the only course of treatment since they are beyond being helped by a vaccine.”

Chrétien speaks of the crucial role played by FAV to help fill the funding gap left by the pharmaceutical industry in the area of antiviral drug development.

“As medical scientists, we know that antivirals are a field badly neglected by the big pharmas,” he said. “It is clear that pharmas are not investing enough in the development of antivirals since barely one per cent of their research is dedicated to antivirals. They are simply not funding the research and development of therapies to treat viral infections that affect mainly developing countries where two-thirds of these infections are located because it is not profitable. You haven’t seen many antivirals coming out recently, with the notable exception of one for HIV that came to market a year ago. It is clear that in the case of HIV, our developed countries have a vested interest in conducting research into antivirals since many of the millions who die each year are our own citizens.”

Though it is alarming to think of the repercussions if we continue to neglect the development of antivirals, Chrétien remains optimistic.

“After 5 years, thanks to the work of some of the world’s best scientific minds, ICAV is currently developing drugs for the treatment of AIDS, Avian flu and Dengue fever. It is noteworthy that ICAV was able to react rapidly when H1N1 came out six months ago,” he said. “In short order, we assembled a group of experts who have been working 24/7 to tackle H1N1. We are optimistic that we will have a new drug to fight H1N1 in the near future.”

The results sound promising.

“We are well on our way to developing an antiviral drug for H1N1 that is different from Tamiflu. One day, this technology will be used to fight other viruses,” he asserts. “with our collaborative international network of academics, we can harvest a sufficient number of ideas and harness ample brain power to be at least as good, and perhaps even better than the big pharmas.”

It is safe to say that, thanks to its novel collaborative model, ICAV is breaking new ground.

“By harvesting ideas from academics, assembling them and taking them through the many phases of drug development, ICAV has established a new world model under the leadership Canadian scientists, and shown that this groundbreaking approach can be applied to all infectious diseases.”