About CURE-VIR
Treatment against paediatric acute viral respiratory infections primarily involves the use of supportive measures. To find a curative treatment, we are looking at existing drugs that have shown potential in treating these viral infections.
This method of recycling, or repurposing, of existing drugs is an appealing strategy as these drugs are often safe and widely accessible. One of the challenges is to find the needle in the haystack, in other words, to find a suitable candidate drug out of all these drugs that have been tested for a variety of indications.
To accomplish that, we are conducting a scoping review, where we do a thorough search in multiple libraries to find candidate drugs that could be tested for efficacy in a clinical trial.
In this review, we aim to summarize available clinical data and combine it with paediatric pharmacological data, to come to a conclusion on the drug’s potential for further testing.
Viral paediatric respiratory infections impose a significant burden on the healthcare system worldwide. Therefore, this is a collaboration between our Radboudumc researchers in the Netherlands and our Stellenbosch University researchers in Cape Town, South Africa.
The South African expertise in the management of paediatric respiratory infections, along with their existing infrastructure for conducting clinical trials in their communities will hopefully help us achieve our aim of reducing the disease burden due to respiratory infections on a global level.
The CUR-VIR team
Prof. Eric Decloedt (Stellenbosch University, South Africa)
Dr. Marieke van der Zalm (Stellenbosch University, South Africa)
Prof. Helena Rabie (Stellenbosch University, South Africa)
Drs. Geert van Weelden (Radboudumc, Nijmegen, The Netherlands)
Drs. Sam Engels (Radboudumc, Nijmegen, The Netherlands)
Prof. Marien de Jonge (Radboudumc, Nijmegen, The Netherlands)
Dr. Lilly Verhagen (Radboudumc, Nijmegen, The Netherlands & Stellenbosch University, South Africa)
