Warp-Speed Covid-19 Vaccine Development: Beneficiaries of Maturation in Biopharmaceutical Technologies and Public-Private Partnerships

Over 50 million people have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, while around 1 million have died due to COVID-19 disease progression. COVID-19 presents flu-like symptoms that can escalate, in about 7 e10 days from onset, into a cytokine storm causing respiratory failure and death. Although social distancing reduces transmissibility, COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics are essential to regain socioeconomic normalcy. Even if effective and safe vaccines are found, pharmacological interventions are still needed to limit disease severity and mortality. Integrating current knowledge and drug candidates (approved drugs for repositioning among >35 candidates) undergoing clinical studies (>3000 registered in ClinicalTrials.gov), we employed Systems Pharmacology approaches to project how antivirals and immunoregulatory agents could be optimally evaluated for use. Antivirals are likely to be effective only at the early stage of infection, soon after exposure and before hospitalization, while immunomodulatory agents should be effective in the later-stage cytokine storm. As current antiviral candidates are administered in hospitals over 5e7 days, a long-acting combination that targets multiple SARS-CoV-2 lifecycle steps may provide a long-lasting, single-dose treatment in outpatient settings. Long-acting therapeutics may still be needed even when vaccines become available as vaccines are likely to be approved based on a 50% efficacy target.

People with rare lung diseases often suffer the burden of delayed diagnosis, limited treatment options, and difficulties in finding expert physicians. One of the reasons for the delay in diagnosis is the limited training for healthcare practitioners on rare diseases. This review explores the main concerns and needs for education on rare lung diseases from the perspectives of both patients and professionals. Despite the increasing interest in rare lung disorders and some recent breakthrough developments on the management of several diseases, healthcare professionals, including general practitioners and hospital workers, receive little education on this topic. Nonetheless, many healthcare professionals show much interest in receiving further training, especially on diagnosis. Patients and families want easier access to high-quality education materials to help them manage their own disease. Well-educated patients are better equipped to deal with chronic diseases, but patient education can be challenging as patients’ individual health issues, and diverse backgrounds can create significant barriers. Raising more awareness for rare lung diseases and further development of patient-centred international expert networks like the European Reference Network on Rare Lung Diseases (ERN-LUNG), which includes both experts and patient representatives, are essential for improving care and education on rare lung diseases. Initiatives such as the Rare Disease Day, have been successful in increasing awareness for rare conditions. The development of online tools for accessing information has had positive effects and should be further supported and extended in the future.

Introduction: The global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic was rapid and devastating to humanity. The public health response to the pandemic was rapid too. Completion of COVID-19 vaccine development was achieved in under a year. The USA and the UK were the first countries to rollout COVID-19 vaccines to contain the pandemic. Successful rollout of the vaccines hinges on many factors, among which is public trust.   Aim: To investigate the sentiments towards COVID-19 vaccines in the USA and UK prior to vaccination rollout.  Methods: Neuro-linguistic programming with human validation was used to analyse a sample of 243,883 COVID-19 vaccine related social media posts from the USA and the UK in the period 28 July to 28 August 2020. The sentiment analysis measured polarity (positive, neutral, negative), and the themes present in negative comments.   Results: In the sample of 243,883 social media posts, both the USA and the UK had a net sentiment profile of approximately 28% positive, 8% negative and 63% neutral sentiment. On further analysis, there were distinct differences between the two country’s social media sentiment towards COVID-19 vaccines. The differences were seen in the themes behind the negative sentiment. In the USA, the negative sentiments were mainly due to health and safety concerns, the fear of making a vaccine mandatory, and the role that pharmaceutical companies would play with the release of vaccines. In the UK the main driver of negative sentiment was the fear of making the vaccine mandatory (almost double the size of the sentiment in the USA).  Conclusions: Negative sentiments towards COVID-19 vaccines were prevalent in the third quarter of 2020 in the USA and the UK. Reasons behind the negative sentiments can be used by authorities in the two countries to design evidence-based interventions to address the refusal of vaccination against COVID-19.