Thellie

Thellie funds scientific research by connecting researchers' projects to donors' causes.

Our ambition is to accelerate the work of researchers by strengthening their links with citizens, associations and companies to encourage responsible progress.

100% of the donations go back to the researchers. Thellie is the participatory funding platform that allows everyone to support research projects proposed directly by researchers.

Our story is that of patients and caregivers who wanted to become involved in research
Thelma and Julie are our loved ones. They suffer from a rare disease.

We identified researchers working on their disease and wanted to support their project with donations to accelerate the development of treatments.

We created the Thellie.org platform to simplify donations to research projects and ensure that they are properly allocated.

Thellie is now the platform to discover, share and fund scientific research.

About this project

COVID-19, which is responsible for the global health crisis, enters lung cells and kills them, causing the most acute symptoms of the coronavirus.

Rather than a pill or other treatment through the bloodstream. We propose a direct treatment strategy, creating an aerosol that directly destroys the virus in the lungs.

To do this, there are natural molecules that can be nebulised into an aerosol and that can be bioengineered to specifically recognise the virus and thus prevent it from binding to the receptors on the lung epithelial cells and entering these cells, these are the well-known antibodies.

The final objective is to produce a treatment for COVID-19.

We are therefore going to develop an immunotherapy in our Institute for Regenerative Medicine and Biotherapies (IRMB), an institute that works with the University of Montpellier, INSERM and the Saint-Eloi Hospital in Montpellier.

We are specialised in this kind of state-of-the-art treatment. The antibody would therefore prevent the binding of COVID-19 in the lungs. Different expertise in virology, biotechnology, antibodies and clinical studies are at work in this project.

Steps

We will first generate the anti-covid antibody and then modify it to make it more effective and evaluate its effectiveness in protecting lung cell cultures from infection. Then the antibody validated as the most effective will be nebulised (turned into an aerosol) and tested on mice.

The project is moving forward rapidly, we already know how to develop the method to turn the drug into an aerosol. We also have the complicated culture of the lung cells for the tests already in place. We have a COVID-19 strain and the infrastructure to study and manipulate it. In addition, we have at our disposal immune cells, which are easily administered and have a strong potential to improve the efficacy of the drug we will be testing.

Budget: €15,000

Make a donation to this project: https: //thellie.org/COVIFAB