Researchers at the National Institutes of Health and the US Army have joined forces in a systematic screening programme to find drug candidates to combat severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

The collaboration, which is already under way, was announced at last week's International Conference on Antiviral Research in Savannah, Georgia.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is collating as many compounds as it can gather that are licensed or in development as antiviral drugs. The US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, will then screen them for activity against the coronavirus thought to cause SARS. In addition, the researchers are screening a commercial library of 400,000 chemicals that are yet to be licensed.

“We hope to run through hundreds of such compounds — or even a thousand — very quickly, starting with those already licensed, and working back along the development pipeline,” says Robert Baker, a USAMRIID virologist. With luck, he says, the programme could identify agents that will be available for treating SARS within months.

In Europe, meanwhile, antiviral expert Erik De Clercq of the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, is taking a different tack. He says he will first identify key points in the biosynthesis of SARS viral RNA that could be targeted by drugs. His group will then evaluate selected compounds from its own chemical library, as well as those submitted by colleagues at other centres. “It's a more 'rational' approach,” he says.