Advanced COVID-19 Treatments Can Save Lives

‘Many potentially beneficial treatments for COVID-19 disease are in various stages of development,’ says Scott Gottlieb M.D., and Mark McClellan, M.D.

In a new editorial published in a Duke-Margolis Working Paper on March 18, 2020, these national health leaders offered the following insights:

Patients facing the risk of serious complications from the virus and no therapeutic alternatives will understandably want access to them. 

We need to determine which treatments work best to advance safe and effective products to market efficiently while providing the best possible care for patients with COVID-19 and enabling access to promising treatments for patients who might benefit from them now.

To accomplish these goals, we can support large scale access to different drugs that have shown they may be effective against the coronavirus in a framework that enables us to collect good information to determine which medicines are working best for patients and ultimately merit full FDA approval. 

At the same time, we can advance treatments that can help protect people from becoming infected with coronavirus in the first place. 

We also need more tools for early detection of the virus so we can prevent future outbreaks.

Building on approaches taken in prior public health emergencies and on improved capabilities for data collection and analysis, all these things are possible to address the COVID-19 pandemic.

We need these drugs and testing tools to help patients now. 

We also need them for the long term. With the isolation and other steps we are taking now, it’s possible that the epidemic spread of coronavirus will wane in the coming weeks and months.

But it’s also possible that there will be additional waves of viral spread with the risk of another epidemic in the future.

At the same time that we focus on developing a drug that can directly target the virus for those who’ve become infected and ill, we must also position ourselves to rapidly identify and contain small outbreaks and protect those most at risk with prophylactic therapies like antibody drugs.

The most efficient pathway to launching medical products to combat the current and future outbreaks of COVID-19 would be to support the FDA in working directly with manufacturers that have high potential to develop and deliver point-of-care diagnostics, therapeutics, and prophylactics.

In addition, the White House should also accelerate steps on a nationwide COVID-19 surveillance partnership to support these efforts and help target further interventions, concluded this letter.

Dr. Gottlieb is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and was Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration from 2017-19. He is a partner at New Enterprise Associates and an independent board member at Illumina and Pfizer, Inc. 

Dr. McClellan, who directs the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy was Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration from 2002-04. He is an independent board member at Alignment Health Care, Cigna, Johnson & Johnson, and Seer, is a Co-Chair of the Health Care Payment Learning and Action Network, and receives advisory fees from Arsenal Capital, CRG, and Mitre.

COVID-19 treatment news published by Coronavirus Today.