The Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning/McGill University

Published purpose

Severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the cause of a global catastrophic pandemic. The development of vaccines is well underway and will provide herd immunity in protecting the majority of individuals. However, the development of antiviral drugs still needs to be pursued to provide long term protection. One step critical to all viruses is the ability to package their genomes into particles that then escape the initial infected cell and proceed to infect normal cells, thus propagating the virus infection. As such, viruses must have specific mechanisms by which their genetic information is recognized and packaged. Our proposal is to identify the packaging signals of CoV-2, which would be the prelude to "drugging" this specific viral vulnerability.