Local COVID-19 Research Group Secures FDA Approval To Start Clinical Trials

Arlington TX

02 November, 2021

7:14 PM

Description

By Alexis Allison, Fort Worth Report November 1, 2021 The Sathyamoorthy family heard on the news that COVID-19 had reached Aspen, Colorado, just as they were leaving the city. It was March 2020, and the family's road trip would come to an end with a long, worried drive — and the birth of an idea. Before Dr. Mohanakrishnan Sathyamoorthy, a cardiologist and scientist in Fort Worth, arrived home, he'd already started thinking about cytokine storms, the body's overzealous and, sometimes, life-threatening response to an infection. He'd read people with COVID-19 were experiencing these storms, which could in turn lead to the failure of multiple organs. He wondered, then, if a drug that calmed the body's immune response could prevent the storms from happening. After his rounds the next day, he sat down and started drafting. His proposal would require further research, and the research required a team. He gathered a cohort of physicians across disciplines in North Texas to form the Fort Worth Clinical Sciences Working Group, a volunteer research team trying to determine if an already-existing drug could treat the sickest COVID-19 patients. A year and six months later, after about 40 Zoom meetings and five in-depth proposal revisions, the group's efforts came to fruition. In late September, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the group's research for clinical trials. And though the journey will stretch longer still — the group needs local hospitals' institutional review boards to approve its research, hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of funding and, ultimately, for the trials to help patients heal — the September milestone is a victory for innovation and Fort Worth, Sathyamoorthy said. To read the full article, click here. Fort Worth Report is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that produces factual, in-depth journalism about city and county government, schools, healthcare, business, and arts and culture in Tarrant County. Always free to read; subscribe to newsletters, read coverage or support our newsroom at fortworthreport.org.