Translational Academy Fellow develops promising antiviral compounds

In recent years, as chikungunya virus surges across the Americas, experts worry that global warming could bring the viral disease to the United States. Spread by mosquitoes, chikungunya causes fever, headaches and often debilitating muscle pain. There is no treatment. Patients suffer the symptoms, hoping for survival. UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy Research Assistant Professor Anwar Hossain is determined to give patients more than hope.  

A medicinal chemist, Hossain is working to develop the first chikungunya treatment by developing two promising compounds discovered by the UNC-based READDI Antiviral Drug Discovery Center (READDI-AC). By redesigning the compounds at the molecular level, he aims to make them more potent against chikungunya and other viruses in the alphavirus family and more stable and well-distributed throughout the body. In short, he hopes to turn raw material into FDA-approved medicines.  

Hossain’s expertise puts him at the nexus of drug discovery and development — between scientific discovery and commercialization — making him the ideal candidate for Eshelman Innovation’s Translational Academy, a fellowship that helps research scientists become entrepreneurs. Originally from Bangladesh, Hossain became a Translational Academy Fellow in March 2025, another in a long list of accomplishments made even more impressive given the researcher’s humble roots.  

“Anwar’s work is the culmination of what we’ve been doing with READDI,” says READDI co-founder and UNC School of Medicine Associate Professor Nat Moorman. “He’s been able to take these promising, early-stage compounds we discovered and begin turning them into drugs. That really embodies the intent of the Translational Academy, to take academic discovery, the ‘cool new thing,’ and optimize it for safe and effective use in patients.”

Building on the Academy’s success

The Translational Academy aims to increase the odds of success in drug development, a long, costly journey riddled with pitfalls. Unlike similar programs at other Universities, the Translational Academy supports both talent and technology, enabling scientists, like Hossain, to grow into entrepreneurial leaders while advancing their specific healthcare technologies toward commercial success.

The program has been a hands-down success. The Academy helped Research Assistant Professor Brianna Vickerman advance her lab breakthrough — a new drug-delivery platform that uses light-activated materials — providing funding and her own advisory board of drug development and industry experts. After raising more than $4 million in grant funding, in 2026 Vickerman launched a company, Covalt Bio, to commercialize the platform.

The Academy helped brain cancer survivor and researcher Andrew Satterlee create the Screening Live Cancer Explants (SLiCE) Core program, a novel way to use patient tumor samples for personalized treatment planning and drug discovery. One of UNC’s most successful shared research facilities, the SLiCE Core is helping UNC Nobel Laureate Dr. Aziz Sancar develop a new brain cancer drug.

Now the Academy is funding Hossain while providing training and an advisory board to support him and his chikungunya research. “The Translational Academy helped me understand that developing a drug is more than just making molecules,” Hossain says. “I have to think about the business side of things. Do we have intellectual property? Is there potential for commercialization?”

From humble beginnings to major milestones

Before Hossain dreamed of developing drugs or even becoming a scientist, he fell in love with math.

“I spent hours and hours doing math as a child. I would do the same math 10 different ways. It was fun for me,” he says.

This was on the outskirts of the world’s most densely populated urban center, Dhaka, Bangladesh, home to 36 million people. Although his father only attended primary school and his mother had no schooling, Hossain excelled as a student. He earned pharmacy and pharmaceutical chemistry degrees from the University of Dhaka and a doctorate in pharmaceutical sciences at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center School of Pharmacy.

“I think I’m the first person from my region to finish a PhD and become a research professor in the U.S. This is a big milestone for my whole area,” he says. “I’m really proud of that.”

The Translational Academy has been a transformative next step in Hossain’s education, and it came at a critical time. From 2020 to 2025, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Structural Genomics Consortium-UNC (SGC-UNC), a not-for-profit partnership that performs basic science for drug discovery, including antiviral research for the READDI-AC. When Hossain’s postdoc was up, the Translational Academy funded his promotion to research assistant professor and provided critical seed funds, allowing him to continue working on the promising chikungunya antiviral compounds.

“Drug discovery and development is a long game,” says Eshelman Innovation’s Interim Executive Director and Chief Strategy Officer Roy Zwahlen. “We pride ourselves on identifying promising early-career research scientists, like Anwar, and enabling them to stay focused on their important work, while also giving them entrepreneurial training to increase their chances of success as the science transitions to the commercial world.”

The Academy helped Hossain win a 2026 grant from the NC Biotech Center to support his work on one of the potential chikungunya drugs, a first-in-class protease inhibitor called RA-2034. For that compound, he has three main translational goals: make the compound patentable to incentivize investors; develop an alternative version in case the original fails; and formulate the compound to move into clinical trials.  

Patentability was a particular challenge. The initial protease inhibitor was discovered by the READDI-AC team from the SGC-UNC, which practices open science, a collaborative approach that accelerates drug discovery. But additional medicinal chemistry was then required to create a unique, patentable drug necessary to secure the investment needed to go through years of high-cost and high-risk clinical development. Hossain spent months developing a new form of the molecule from the original discovery. Not only was the new molecule patentable, but it was also more than a thousand times more potent. The provisional patent application is underway.  

“In addition to solving all the problems with the performance metrics, Anwar is making new versions of these compounds that are completely novel and, therefore, will generate intellectual property to make sure that it can attract the investment needed so that sick people can get the medicine they need,” Moorman says.

Hossain is quick to credit the many people who are helping him advance these compounds.  

“These are complex issues requiring teamwork,” says Hossain, who has access to his own advisory board, including experts in medicinal chemistry, virology, the law and the pharmaceutical industry. “Without the Translation Academy, it would have been impossible for me to navigate this commercialization path.”