Around early 2016, Dr. Malone and his wife started Atheric Pharmaceutical, LLC. The purpose of the company was to identify and repurpose FDA-approved drugs for Zika.
Atheric Pharmaceutical published an article titled “Zika virus: Accelerating development of Medical Countermeasures by re-purposing licensed drugs” in April 2016. The paper says it was “submitted by Atherical Pharmaceutical, LLC to an upcoming conference on Zika.” It does not list an author for the paper.
While the paper did not list an author, it references Robert Malone, Sina Bavari, and Veronica Soloveva as you can see above. Sina Bavari was the Science Director of USAMRIID on April 16, 2016 when this paper was published. Veronica Soloveva was also employed at USAMRIID in April 2016. They were both major proponents of Remdesivir, and published a paper on Ebola and Remdesivir just before publicition of the paper referencing them at Atheric.
The Malones had two websites related to Zika in 2016. One was atheric.com, the other was zikaresponse.org. Both these websites and their articles have been deleted, but some articles remain available in internet archives.
The April 2016 Atheric article Accelerating development of Medical Countermeasures by re-purposing licensed drugs outlines screening methods used to identify compouds useful for Zika. The methods used at Atheric sound similar to language used to describe “DOMANE” used later in January 2020 to identify treatments for the SARS-CoV-2 virus: high throughput screening.
Methods/summarized description of the project: Hypothesis-driven high throughput re-purposed drug screening. An iterative multi-step drug selection and screening algorithm was established; 1) drug targets involving inhibition of virus-host cell interactions were identified,
Multiple drugs were identified in screening at Atheric for Zika.
Results: Re-purposed licensed drugs with anti-Zika activity which are safe for use in pregnancy. Three general mechanisms of action (including autophagy inhibition) have been identified and corresponding compounds have been screened. Multiple re-purposed drugs have been identified which meet selection criteria for subsequent development.
Veronica Soloveva was employed at USAMRIID from July 2013, according to her LinkedIn page. She said she was “a lead of in vitro testing for anti-viral and anti-toxin discovery projects established collaborations on 80 projects (currently) with major pharmaceutical companies” at USAMRIID. She moved from USAMRIID to Merck in November 2018, where she is employed as a principle scientist.
On March 02, 2016, Sina Baviri, Veronica Soloveva and many other authors published Therapeutic efficacy of the small molecule GS-5734 against Ebola virus in rhesus monkeys published in Nature. This March 02, 2016 paper was linked by both of the Malone’s now-deleted websites on Atheric.com and Zikaresponse.org.
The research in the paper was based on research at USAMRIID. Sina Bavari, as USAMRIID Science Director, led an effort to test GS-5734 against multiple viruses including Lassa, MERS, Marburg, and Ebola. GS-5734 is otherwise known as Remdesivir. Bavari’s team reported good results against Ebola on October 9, 2015. If Zika was tested in this USAMRIID study, it was not mentioned.
Veronica led the cell cultures of the USAMRIID Remdesivir study. “In cell culture studies, led at USAMRIID by Veronica Soloveva, Ph.D., GS-5734 was active against a broad spectrum of viral pathogens.”
The rest of the article is after the paywall break.