Ara Darzi - The race to find a coronavirus treatment has one major obstacle: big pharma
The past few weeks have
revealed the worst and the best in human responses to the coronavirus crisis –
from the supermarket hoarders clearing the shelves to the neighbour-hood groups
organising help for elderly and vulnerable people. When it comes to the
pharmaceutical companies, how should we judge their response? They, after all,
hold the key to ending the pandemic. Yet in one vital respect their behaviour
has more in common with the supermarket hoarders than the neighbourhood groups.
Our exit strategy from
the global lockdown depends on the
development of an effective vaccine, as is well-known. A huge effort is
under way to find such a vaccine, but we cannot afford to wait the 18 months it
might take. In the meantime, as
the death toll increases, doctors are desperate for treatments that would
lessen the impact of the virus, by shortening the infection, reducing its
severity and in that way saving lives. There is now a global hunt for a
coronavirus drug. But it is a fight against time. The focus is therefore on
existing treatments already proved to be safe for other diseases which will
need less testing and be easier and quicker to manufacture in quantity.
Scores of trials are
under way around the world. The World Health Organization
has identified four of the most promising therapies – including an HIV
combination treatment, an anti-malarial and a drug developed but never used
against Ebola - for testing in a global trial launched last month. But we
cannot pause the search while waiting for the results. The need for new
effective agents is too great.
The best way to
identify candidate drugs is to use artificial intelligence (AI) to crunch huge
quantities of data to find the ones that might work. Major AI companies
are putting
their immense computing power at the service of scientists engaged in
this hunt. But they are being
hampered: because some pharmaceutical companies are failing to share all of the
data on potential candidate treatments that they hold. Like toilet roll
profiteers, they are keeping it stashed in their digital attics and cellars
where others cannot get at it, on the grounds that it is commercially
confidential....https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/02/coronavirus-vaccine-big-pharma-data
