Virginia Commonwealth University
Annual Report 2020-2021

Now that COVID-19 vaccines have reached millions of arms, the next major step in fighting the pandemic will come in antiviral treatments to reduce hospitalizations and deaths among those infected by the coronavirus.

One promising treatment is molnupiravir, an antiviral that has been shown to reduce the chance of hospitalization and death by 30 percent. On Nov. 4, the U.K. became the first nation to approve the use of molnupiravir to treat COVID-19. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency-use authorization in December.

As an oral medication, molnupiravir is simpler to administer than current treatments, such as monoclonal antibodies and antiviral drugs like remdesivir that are given through infusion and injection. While molnupiravir could be a game-changer, quick production and distribution is critical to expanding treatment access and reaching more patients.

That’s where the Medicines for All Institute in the VCU College of Engineering comes in. The institute has developed several efficient, low-cost, and large-scale synthetic manufacturing processes for molnupiravir that are available to any manufacturer. Several of the institute’s manufacturing routes rely on widely available raw materials that will circumvent supply chain challenges and reduce costs. In addition, the high-yield enzymatic process requires only two chemical transformations, cutting the number of production steps in half.

“We were fortunate to be in a position to work on this important treatment for COVID-19 during the pandemic,” said B. Frank Gupton, Ph.D., founder and CEO of the Medicines for All Institute and the Floyd D. Gottwald Jr. Chair in Pharmaceutical Engineering. Gupton is also a professor and chair of VCU’s Department of Chemical and Life Science Engineering. “We have received numerous inquiries and are supporting global manufacturers to implement our processing technology.”

M4ALL was established in 2017 and initially focused on developing lower cost preparation methods that increase access to lifesaving medications for HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and other diseases. Their process can be applied to other medicines, therefore meeting an urgent care need today, while also signaling dramatic change in future pharmaceutical manufacturing technologies.

“Medicines for All is uniquely poised to conduct a lot of innovative science that’s going to help drive down the cost of health care — particularly global health care — and help advance some of the research initiatives on our medical campus here at VCU,” said B. Frank Gupton, Ph.D., founder and CEO, when the center first launched.