Penn Medicine Researcher Awarded $1 Million to Expand COVID-19 Treatment Discovery Platform

Excerpt from the Press Release:

PHILADELPHIA —  David C. Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc, an assistant professor of Translational Medicine & Human Genetics and director of the Center for Cytokine Storm Treatment & Laboratory at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, was awarded $1 million by the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI) to expand the scope of the COvid19 Registry of Off-label & New Agents (CORONA) project and build out his team to accelerate treatment identification for COVID-19.

“For the last year, over 100 volunteers and members of my lab have worked on nights and weekends to extract and centralize data for CORONA which has been used to identify and advance the most promising treatments for COVID-19,” Fajgenbaum said. “With this grant from PICI, we can build out our team to integrate and analyze data with the effort and urgency that this global pandemic warrants.”

CORONA is the world’s largest database of COVID-19 treatments, covering 400+ treatments that have been reported to be administered to 340,000+ patients, helping researchers to identify and prioritize promising treatments for well-designed clinical trials and to inform patient care. With funding from PICI, several new tools are in development or have already been built, including an open-access dashboard that harmonizes data between studies and presents vital data points for prioritizing promising treatments, such as the number of randomized control trials that have been completed, the number that are open, the number that achieved their primary endpoint, and others.

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