Moderna is eyeing a new target: long Covid. The pharmaceutical company that became a household name when it developed a Covid-19 vaccine now wants to treat the disease’s lingering effects, which have afflicted tens of millions of people by some estimates. “We see this as an opportunity for Moderna to repeat our leadership and our expertise,” Bishoy Rizkalla, the company’s vice president of long Covid, told Daniel. LINK
Rizkalla said Moderna has no cure in the offing. He said the company is waiting for the science to develop around how the condition works before it begins “active research into solutions.” Well I won’t be too optimistic then…
Moderna could start with researching a large group of patients, they have the money for it. Earned from the vaccinations they sold, mostly paid for by governments. And now they want to wait for those governments to pay for research so Moderna can cash again?
I thought with the first post, ah good big Pharma willing to put resources into finding treatment(s), then with the second post this thread my hopes were dashed. I suppose any organisation raising the issue is a good thing, but it is a massive research effort that is ultimately required.
Repurposing existing drugs is unlikely to come from pharmaceutical companies, they make more money from newer drugs. They'd be happy to sell them, but all their incentives go against bothering with that. This is really the bind here: drug trials are usually done by pharmaceutical companies, not by health care systems or academia, and pharmas have zero incentives here to do the research, only to sell the products. They would be very happy to pocket the money if someone boosted sales for some drugs based on research, but they won't do the trials because the system isn't built for this, it only encourages new patents. They could still make a lot of money this way, but it's not the usual way and they mostly prefer to chase big money-makers, rather that commodity sales. So basically the entire health care industry isn't built to do this, it has to come from public spending, and they... just don't do that. It's just not how it's done. Public losses, money left on the table for private companies, millions suffer, trillions in global losses, and it's locked in place just because... it's not how they do things, and it seems that working around the system is just unthinkable for an issue hardly anyone cares about. So someone has to start caring about the patients, but, again, zero incentives to do that anywhere because traditional magical mind pseudoscience is too popular in the profession that handles all of this, in addition to decades of having refused to do any of this on grounds that they don't even believe that it's a thing, which is as embarrassing as it's liable. Sometimes I just hate people.
