Krakow, Poland – September 21, 2021 – Selvita S.A. – [ticker: WSE: SLV] – one of the largest preclinical contract organizations in Europe, announced that it has received EUR 0.71 M grant to create technology allowing to develop new drugs against diseases caused by coronaviruses. The grant comes from the National Center of Research and Development with a total of EUR 1.37 M dedicated to the project. The Platform will enable the Company to expand its portfolio of drug discovery services offered.

The Project entitled “Technology platform for new generations of drugs against diseases caused by coronaviruses, in particular, SARS-CoV-2”, has received the financing within the program POIR.01.01.01-00-2373/20 and will be executed by scientists from the Chemistry Department at Selvita.

The aim of the project is to accelerate the identification of inhibitors of key proteases involved in the process of coronavirus replication, including that of SARS-CoV-2, by means of high throughput screening of a focused library containing innovative compounds with potential antiviral properties. The structures included in the library are unique, unprecedented in the literature and have been designed based on the mechanism of the viral action. The compounds will be made using modern synthetic methodology based on the photocatalytic styrene functionalization, recently patented by Selvita. In order to further accelerate the discovery of a new drug, compounds will undergo characterization with regard to their physicochemical properties and selectivity before being included in the library.

An additional advantage of the proposed service platform is its flexibility to be used for identification of a broad range of cysteine, serine and aspartyl protease inhibitors.

Diseases caused by viruses constitute a major social and economic burden as demonstrated by the recent coronavirus pandemic. The goal of our project is to enable rapid market introduction of new antiviral drugs, especially those with therapeutic potential against SARS-CoV-2. We expect that our innovative platform will deliver safe drugs with the potential to contribute to solving the issue of treating viral diseases such as COVID-19. We also believe that our platform will allow to shorten the process of discovering a wider variety of new antiviral drugs, which may be particularly important in the case of another epidemic, analogous to the current pandemic one caused by SARS-CoV-2.

Completion of this project will allow Selvita to expand its services offer in the area of antiviral research, which will complement the existing broad portfolio of in vitro and in vivo pharmacological services offered by our Croatian company Fidelta – comments Mirosława Zydroń, PhD, Eng, MBA, Member of the Management Board and Director of the Chemistry Department at Selvita S.A.

The project will be executed in 2021 – 2023.