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August 14 - September 25, 2020
Consider the locusts in East Africa. One of the few active ingredients effective in combating the desert locust is deltamethrin. Bayer has donated 170,000 liters of our pest control product Decis ULV (deltamethrin) to vulnerable countries identified by the FAO, Kenya, and Uganda. By the time this book publishes, impacted communities there will have an added defense against all-consuming locust swarms to better protect local food and financial security as pressure from COVID-19 continues.
Dr. Philip Miller is the senior vice president at Bayer.
While Insilico Medicine is focused on AI and comprises multiple interdisciplinary groups, we have five main divisions: software development, drug discovery, biology, chemistry, and deep learning theory. After a brief brainstorming session with the leaders of these divisions, we decided to prioritize our projects by the phase of the disease, taking into consideration abundant information from China. We decided to pursue these strategies: Generative chemistry: monthly “sprints” to generate novel molecules for key viral proteins using a generative chemistry pipeline starting from the 3C-like main
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we published the 100 synthesized molecules via a dedicated page on our company’s website1 and on the ResearchGate preprint server. This resulted in numerous inquiries from medicinal chemists. After regaining our chemistry capabilities, we decided to synthesize and test a few molecules from these generations.
The purely empirical approach has proved suboptimal, with hundreds of studies thus far revealing no therapeutic benefit and with initially promising drugs leading to severe adverse reactions and lethalities. What will the future hold? Hopefully, a realization that AI and the clinic are inseparable entities, with the patient at the center of attention. Precision medicine cannot be achieved in any other way. Potentially the most significant transformation of all will be the shift toward a paradigm of inclusion of both human and artificial intelligence.
Unfortunately, both rationale drug design and empirical research appears to be letting us down or under-performing in terms of the expectations for drug development. Not sure anyone really has any great ideas on what to do.
Unfortunately, many scientists have no established contacts with key Chinese labs and are unaware of their research activities. In the post-COVID-19 era, we need closer East-West collaborations, courteous professional relations, and integration of research activities with Chinese scientists, whose data and expertise often surpass the West. Infectious diseases know no borders; so should collaborative efforts.
Unfortunately this is just not the case. It would be great if the East had more to contribute to biomedical fields contemporarily other than the man and brain power the West imports.
Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, is the founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, a leader in artificial intelligence (AI) for use in drug discovery. Since 2012, he has published over 120 peer-reviewed research papers. Evelyne Bischof, MD, is an internist, associate professor at the Shanghai University of Medicine and Health Sciences, and physician at the University Hospital Basel, a consultant to Insilico.
We must speed to develop effective therapies that reduce the mortality rate;
This appears to have been potentially already accomplished via protecting nursing homes and use of corticosteroids in hospitalized cases.
COVID-19 disease has evolved from the early recognition of severe lower respiratory disease, to the more common diagnosis of mild upper airway disease. Broader systemic effects are now evident as well, including involvement of the blood vessels and blood coagulation abnormalities which may underlie many complications, including embolism, stroke, heart attacks, organ failure, and even “COVID toes”—a painful condition probably caused by inflammation of small blood vessels. Likewise, the recent association of pediatric SARS-CoV-2 infection with a severe immune disorder that appears very similar
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The risk for children is really low. We have a fairly good grasp on this now.
The cost of manufacturing a dose of pandemic vaccine or drug is expected to benefit from the economies of scale that spread the fixed costs of development and manufacturing over a large volume of doses. But affordability also depends on the resources needed to distribute medicines and vaccines to local communities and then safely administer them to the people who need them.
Dr. Julie Louise Gerberding is executive vice president and chief patient officer at Merck & Co. Inc.,
Meanwhile, these other health system stakeholders have been really partnering with each other—by massively consolidating. Three groups, United/Optum, CVSHealth (Aetna), and Express/Cigna, now affect the delivery and payment of health care for more than 75 percent of the US population. They combine the largest insurers with the largest PBMs; they own the three largest specialty pharmacies; have aligned formally or informally with large retailers; created strategic relationships with the three large drug distributors; and increasingly own health care providers. The implications for health care
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Manufacturers’ gross-to-net reductions—the difference between the list price a manufacturer sets for a drug and what payers actually pay—has more than doubled since 2012. The average discount for branded pharmaceuticals runs at nearly 50 percent.1 Payers wield many weapons to extract these discounts, including the ultimate one: excluding a drug from coverage. CVS and Express Scripts, two of the largest PBMs, now exclude 282 and 296 drugs, respectively—up from 154 and eighty-five just a few years ago.
Oncology and rare disease drugs dominate the drug development pipeline.
The increase in rare and specialty drug discovery and development has come at the cost of the development of new primary care drugs, on which payers can exercise their greatest negotiating leverage.
Not that pharma’s success in creating therapies for less prevalent diseases hasn’t created enormous medical benefits. Drug companies have made great progress in treating late-stage cancers; we can now save children who, just a few years ago, would have been doomed by conditions like cystic fibrosis. But these advances haven’t been generally lauded. Reputationally, the drug industry has never been seen so negatively4. The public at large are subject to near-constant rhetoric about high drug prices and high-priced lobbyists—but, one result of pharma’s shift from large-population medicines is
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Jeff Berkowitz is the CEO of Real Endpoints,
But the Chinese government was not being honest. The event had been filmed three days earlier to be sure that any glitches could be hidden from the public, so as not to embarrass the regime. When citizens of Shanghai stepped outside to see firsthand what was on their television screens, they looked up at an empty sky.
Three weeks into the new year, a thirty-year-old man who had traveled from Wuhan to Seattle was diagnosed as having the new disease, a novel coronavirus disease later named COVID-19. Ten days later, the Trump administration suspended entry into the United States by any foreign nationals who had traveled to China in the previous fourteen days, excluding the immediate family members of American citizens or permanent residents.
On March 27, President Trump signed into law the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which provided more than $2 trillion to support workers, businesses, states, and localities hit by the unprecedented financial impacts of the suddenly essential closure of the economy. The law provided $3.5 billion to BARDA to provide biopharmaceutical companies with funds for the development and manufacturing of vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments, and for the purchase of these products. We volunteered to help expedite our member companies’ access to these funds.
The advice we can give as seasoned investors includes: Contingency planning is power. Extending the runway sooner is better. There is grace in communicating honestly Being generous where you can is a virtue, but you have a responsibility to the business and to all shareholders.
Nina Kjellson is a general partner at Canaan, an early-stage investment firm.
if we can positively impact the lives of patients by discovering and developing innovative new medicines, the system will reward that risk-taking with superlative investment returns.
Bruce Booth is a partner at Atlas Venture, an early-stage biotech VC firm, where he invests in new therapeutics start-ups.
Alexander Karnal is partner and managing director at Deerfield.
Investment Lesson No. 2: Beware of false bottoms.
Investment Lesson No. 3: When we incur a significant investment loss, we hold a post-mortem to try to discern whether we made a prospective mistake.
Investment Lesson No. 4 (with credit to the renowned investor Howard Marks): The most profitable investments often involve two features: a) envisioning a future that is at odds with what most other people envision, and b) being right.
The investment needed to achieve an order of magnitude improvement is insignificant relative to (a) the risk-adjusted economic value of the improvement, and (b) the investment required to achieve equivalent improvements with respect to other existential threats
Mark Lampert is the founder and general partner of BVF Partners LP (“
The NIH has so far lagged its Chinese counterparts in providing important research about COVID to the scientific and medical community, and in this shortfall has left industry and investors looking to experts in Asia and other areas for prepublication research and commentary about the virus’s characteristics and the treatment of the disease. Regrettably, the premier research institution in the US is in danger of losing its stature and reputation in the fight against the most disruptive medical threat of a lifetime.
This claim is laughable. US biomed research laps China's many times over - not only on COVID-19 but essentially every field.
COVID puts the structural flaws of the American health care system on full display.
This claim is nonsense. It puts the bumbling of Acela corridor govt leaders on display (returning Covid-19 positive patients to nursing homes) and the generalized poor health due to bad habit (not bad healthcare) of the aging US pop.
The outcry over drug affordability often results in calls for drug price controls that would squelch the kind of important innovation that has given us a head start on fighting COVID. Now, amid this crisis, America has seen how essential proper insurance is for public health and patched some of the gaps in America’s coverage to ensure that COVID tests and treatments are fully covered.
Peter Kolchinsky, PhD, a biotechnology investor and virologist, is managing partner of RA Capital Management LP,
cases. Serologic testing holds the key to defining the proportion of the population that has been exposed to SARS-CoV-2,
Unfortunately this isnt really true. We still have no great estimates on how wide exposure has been places.
Together we ended the Crisis—and better prepared ourselves for the next one—through collaboration and competition.
No Covid-19 was ab unmitigated failure for the world, especially China. No major innovation developed in the six months after Covid-19 hit the US that enabled normal economic activity and personal life. Additionally, government generally over and under reacted inappropriately in every way possible in different places.
The fact that we did not better prepare, as well as our lacking response in the early phases of the pandemic, will be recorded as a collective failure of global leadership that probably rivals or exceeds the mishaps that caused the great wars of the twentieth century.
Wikipedia says the scientific method is “an empirical method of acquiring knowledge that has characterized the development of science since at least the seventeenth century. It involves careful observation, applying rigorous skepticism about what is observed, given that cognitive assumptions can distort how one interprets the observation. It involves formulating hypotheses, via induction, based on such observations; experimental and measurement-based testing of deductions drawn from the hypotheses; and refinement (or elimination) of the hypotheses based on the experimental findings.”
Paul Sekhri is the president and CEO of eGenesis Inc.
There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game …—CAPITALISM AND FREEDOM, Milton Friedman
Enlightenment is intrinsically connected to a commitment to the quest for social justice,
Social justice is in conflict with individualozed justice. Individual rights are the basis of the Enlightenment. Author is mixed up and misinformed.
