Beating COVID-19 will change how new therapies are developed

That’s the message from a biotech CEO and a biotech VC in a new op-ed in STAT News. 

While there’s no silver lining to the pandemic, it’s nonetheless driving “an unprecedented transformation of the global medical research ecosystem,”explains John Crowley, CEO of Amicus Therapeutics (BIO member!) and Kush Parmar, managing partner at 5AM Ventures and one of the founding partners of the COVID R&D partnership. 

“Cutting-edge medical research and data are being shared and analyzed in near real time,” in an effort to find COVID-19 vaccines, treatments, and diagnostics as quickly as possible. 

We’re also breaking down “silos between medical research and patient care,” leading to an “adaptive research network that can harness the latest findings from patients treated in frontline settings and use that experience to help select and test the most promising new therapies and vaccines in clinical trials.” 

Three important tools are reducing R&D time and cost: “modernized regulatory science, digital medicine technologies, and adaptive clinical trial designs.” 

These shifts will not only help us get out of this crisis—they’re also “making the future of medicine a reality today.” And after the pandemic, will help us beat other illnesses and save millions more lives, too. 

Read the whole thing. 

Learn more about what the biotech industry’s doing to combat COVID-19 at www.bio.org/coronavirus.

More Health Care News:

The Wall Street Journal: Race is on to create rapid COVID-19 tests for the fall
“Hundreds of teams are competing a la ‘Shark Tank’ for NIH funding to develop at-home diagnostic strips and other options.”

Biopharma Dive: Merck makes COVID-19 drug plans clear with flurry of deals
“The two experimental vaccines come by way of Themis, an Austrian biotech Merck is acquiring, and the nonprofit IAVI, with which Merck will collaborate. Clinical trials of the two candidates will begin later this year, Merck said. The pharma also bought rights to an oral antiviral drug from privately held Ridgeback Biotherapeutics.” 

The University of California-Davis has published a new study showing how gene editing can be used as a tool for conservation of endangered fish and “revolutionize environmental monitoring.” Let’s dive in.

It’s an amazing tool for health, agriculture, and the environment—allowing scientists to do everything “from growing disease-resistant crops to, more recently, a diagnostic test for the virus that causes COVID-19,” says ScienceDaily. (Innovature has covered a lot of the cool things we might be able to do with CRISPR, like saving bananas and preventing the spread of malaria.)

But wait, what’s CRISPR? It’s gene editing technology that allows scientists to make small, precise edits to an organism’s own genome, much faster than traditional breeding techniques. 

And it could be used for conservation and resource management, too, by using it to “rapidly detect and differentiate among species,” explains ScienceDaily.

In the study, researchers were able to “genetically distinguish” endangered Delta smelt from other fish species that look exactly alike, “with no need to extract DNA.”

They think this could be used for other species, too—enabling researchers to confirm “species at crime scenes, in the animal trade at border crossings, for monitoring poaching, and for other animal and human health applications.”

“CRISPR can do a lot more than edit genomes,” said study co-author Andrea Schreier. “It can be used for some really cool ecological applications, and we’re just now exploring that.”

Read the full article here.