Beyond vaccines: Bill Gates on drug development for the next pandemic

 In the NYT:

Bill Gates: How to Develop Life-Saving Drugs Much Faster

"The Covid-19 pandemic would look very different if scientists had been able to develop a treatment sooner. The death rates are likely to have been far lower, and it may have been harder for myths and misinformation to spread the way they did.

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"We’re lucky that scientists made Covid vaccines as quickly as they did — if they hadn’t, the death toll would be far worse. But in the event of another pandemic, even if the world is able to develop a vaccine for a new pathogen in 100 days, it will still take a long time to get the vaccine to most of the population. This is especially true if you need two or more doses for full and continued protection. If the pathogen is especially transmissible and deadly, a therapeutic drug could save tens of thousands or more.

"Even once there is a vaccine, we’ll still need good therapeutics. As we’ve seen with Covid, not everyone who can take a vaccine will choose to do so. And, along with non-pharmaceutical interventions, therapeutics can reduce the strain on hospitals, which would prevent the overcrowding that ultimately means that some patients die who otherwise wouldn’t.

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"All of which is to say: Therapeutics are fundamentally important in an outbreak. To understand what caused the delay in drugs and how we can avoid such delays in the future, we need to take a tour through the world of therapeutics: what they are, how they get from the lab to the market, why they didn’t fare better early in this pandemic and how innovation can set the stage for a better response in the future.

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"One of the keys to ensuring that health care workers have better treatment options in the next big outbreak than they did for Covid will be investing in large libraries of drug compounds that researchers can quickly scan to see whether existing therapies work against new pathogens. Some of these libraries exist already, but the world needs more. We need libraries that cover many types of drugs, but the most promising, in my view, are those known as pan-family and broad-spectrum therapies — either antibodies or drugs that can treat a wide range of viral infections, especially those that are likely to cause a pandemic."