Treatments of COVID-19: Old Drugs, New Tricks

COVID-19 is a global pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. There is a huge worldwide effort underway to discover vaccines and new drugs, and to repurpose old drugs to treat this disease. This talk will discuss the drugs that are currently being used to treat COVID-19: remdesivir, chloroquine and the combination of lopinavir/ritonavir.

View the recording or download the slides

Speakers

Dr. Anna Codina

Director Pharmaceutical Business Unit, Bruker BioSpin

Anna has a degree in Chemistry and a PhD in Protein NMR from the University of Barcelona, Spain. During this time she did several industrial placements at pharmaceutical industries (Pharmhispania, Spain, and Genentech, SF, USA) and she worked for the NMR service of the University. She then moved to Cambridge, UK, to do a post-doc in protein NMR at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.

After her post-doc she worked in the Analytical R&D department of Pfizer, UK, for 8 years, becoming proficient in low level impurity structure elucidation, reaction monitoring, qNMR and the preparation of regulatory documentation.

She joined Bruker in 2011 as Material Characterisation Laboratory Manager. Since then her role has evolved. She started looking after the pharmaceutical market in 2015 as Product Portfolio Manager. Anna and team launched several products: InsightMR, InsightXpress and InsighCell for process understanding and monitoring; Fragment Based Screening analysis tools, PotencyMR for potency determination of drugs by qNMR; the minispec Form Check for solid form quantification and NMR Instrument Qualification packages to facilitate compliance. She is now director of the pharmaceutical business Unit at Bruker BioSpin.

Dr. Niamh O'Boyle

Assistant Professor, Pharmacy - Trinity College Dublin

Dr. Niamh O'Boyle is a qualified pharmacist and a member of the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland. She received her BSc(Pharm) and PhD degree from Trinity College Dublin, and subsequently was awarded a postdoctoral scholarship at University of Göteborg in Sweden investigate the allergenic activity of epoxides and epoxy resins. Niamh was awarded a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the School of Biochemistry & Immunology, TCD, working on 'Cancer, Tubulin and Free Radicals: New Therapy'. Following a period as assistant lecturer at the School of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences at Dublin Institute of Technology, she was appointed as assistant professor at the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at TCD in 2017. She runs several diverse research projects and is currently supported by a TCD Provost's PhD Project Award, CAMS-UK, the Royal Society of Chemistry and Science Foundation Ireland. Her research work is consistently published in high-quality international, peer-reviewed journals and she has been a co-applicant on two published patents. She also works as a locum pharmacist in community pharmacy.