Draper Announces BARDA Award to Study Filovirus Infection
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Draper today announced that the company was awarded a third project in September of 2024 – Screening Countermeasures In vitro for Filovirus Infections (SCIFI) – under an Other Transactional Agreement (OTA) with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). BARDA is part of the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Draper’s long-term goal is to support BARDA’s development and evaluation of medical countermeasures (MCMs) for national health security.
In September 2023, Draper signed an Other Transaction Authority (OTA) agreement #75A50123C00042 with BARDA, which is valued at up to $90.5 million over a five-year period.
Roger Odegard, Draper’s Biodefense/Accelerating MCM Development portfolio lead and the OTA Program Manager, said “We are pleased to expand our work with BARDA and our partners at Boston University (BU) to develop solutions that will protect the health security of the nation against high priority biothreats like filoviruses.”
The overall objective of SCIFI is to use Draper’s flagship microphysiological system (MPS) – termed PREDICT96 – and other cross-cutting engineering technologies to improve the scientific understanding of how filoviruses attack human tissues. Filoviruses cause a complex and life-threatening pathology and are responsible for dozens of outbreaks, most notably the 2014 Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa. Many aspects of filovirus pathogenesis are difficult to model using traditional cell culture and animal models, particularly the cascading events that lead to vascular dysfunction, subsequent hemorrhage, and death.
Draper will fill this gap with its PREDICT96 MPS platform adapted for use in maximum biological containment while modeling complex immune/vascular interaction in a more physiologically relevant endothelial tissue environment. A potential future goal proposed in unfunded options is to enable the evaluation and screening of investigative medical countermeasures that could eventually be used to treat filovirus patients during an outbreak.
The SCIFI project will be led by David Sutherland, Ph.D. (Project Manager), Vishal Tandon, Ph.D. (Principal Investigator), and Christine Fisher, Ph.D. (Technical Director).
“This project is exciting because it combines Draper’s advanced microfluidics technology with integrated sensors and sophisticated human tissue models to help solve a critical public health and safety challenge,” said Vishal Tandon. Similarly, Christine Fisher remarked, “The Draper team is thrilled to work with BARDA and our partners at BU in applying PREDICT96 to a critical area of infectious disease research and potentially testing life-saving medical countermeasures for the nation.”
To do this work, Draper has partnered with the BU National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratory (NEIDL), one of the world’s leading research organizations for infectious disease research, including filovirus infections. NEIDL will provide critical expertise in virology specific to the pathogenesis of filovirus infections for the SCIFI program and will later lead authentic filovirus infection studies in its high-containment (BSL 4) lab facilities.
“We are very excited to partner with Draper to model infection and disease progression in an advanced microphysiological system,” said John Connor, Ph.D., a NEIDL faculty member and BU professor of virology, who will perform the studies along with colleagues Robert Davey, Ph.D., and Elke Muhlberger, Ph.D. “The ability to observe how high-consequence viruses like filoviruses infect and cause damage in these complex tissue models will help us design and apply better treatments and prevention strategies in the future.”
In addition to SCIFI, Draper is executing two seminal projects under the OTA. The goals of the CURIE project are to study the natural history of gastrointestinal acute radiation syndrome (GI-ARS) with the potential to identify biomarkers and drug targets from multi-omics analyses and to evaluate drug candidates. The second project – referred to as RHYTHMATIICS – is focused on infectious disease research, where the aim is to study SARS-CoV-2 infection in diverse donor tissues to better understand the effects of demographics, such as age and sex, and co-morbidities, such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
This project has been funded in whole or in part with federal funds from the Department of Health and Human Services; Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response; Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, under OT number: 75A50123C00042.
About Draper
Draper is a non-profit research and development company that solves some of the nation’s most important challenges. With more than 2,000 employees working in collaboration across 12 campuses, Draper delivers transformative, mission-driven solutions that successfully meet our customers’ requirements. These efforts focus on four critical mission areas: Strategic Systems, Space Systems, Electronic Systems, and Biotechnology Systems. To extend our legacy into the future, the Draper Scholars program engages with the next generation of innovators while DraperSPARX™ seeks to partner with startups and small businesses that can further our mission. To learn more about Draper, visit www.draper.com.
About the NEIDL
Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) is a state-of-the-art research facility that supports the work of investigators who focus on infectious diseases that are—or have the potential to become—major public health concerns. NEIDL research program focuses on understanding how pathogens cause disease, and is dedicated to the development of diagnostics, vaccines, and treatments to combat these emerging and re-emerging infectious disease threats. To learn more about the NEIDL, visit www.bu.edu/neidl/.
Released April 16, 2025
