As I write this blog, I’m looking outside my home office window onto a glorious spring afternoon. I’m venturing outside my home only occasionally, and I’m socially isolated.
Still, reflecting on these unprecedented times, I’m optimistic about our chances as a global community to tackle the threat that COVID-19 poses to our way of life. All eyes are on the life sciences industry to help get life back to normal. To do that, life sciences companies will need to collaborate on a scale not imagined previously.
The industry has already responded to the current coronavirus threat by marshalling resources and doing what it does best: discovering drugs, developing them, and getting them ready for market. Multiple new products are now in the pipeline and being assessed for effectiveness.
Recent advances are aiding in the response. It used to take two to five years to develop a vaccine. Today, rapid vaccine development technologies should enable a vaccine to be ready in 12 months. And the industry is capable of creating scale manufacturing capacity for one billion doses, while assessing those doses for safety. Phase 1 and 2 trials are already planned for September with results projected for January, then initial scale manufacture for March, and scale production by June 2021.
New and old technologies are being used to fight this coronavirus—including live attenuated or inactivated vaccines, subunit vaccines, genetic vaccines, viral vector vaccines. Yesterday, we talked about new drugs curing cancers in previously unimagined ways. Today, grand science, in an extraordinary effort, is focused on vaccine development.
As we recover from COVID-19, our response to this pandemic has taught us vital lessons about the intersection of data, science and technology. We have seen the importance of:
- Collaborating across the ecosystem, with friends and competitors alike, on a scale unimagined until now. Government, industry and universities are coming together across national borders to further research. On April 7, AstraZeneca, GSK, Cambridge University, and French clinical diagnostics company Novacyt announced a collaborative effort around testing.
- Bringing in more “big guns” and relying on high-performance computing and artificial intelligence (AI) to boost the chance of discovery. US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has deployed the world’s most powerful supercomputer, the IBM-built Summit, in the fight against COVID-19. Researchers have been granted emergency computation time on Summit, using it to perform simulations with unprecedented speed. In just two days, Summit identified and studied 77 small-molecule drug potential compounds to combat COVID-19. That task, if using a traditional wet-lab approach, would normally have taken years.
- Capturing data and using it. While a cure is being developed, the immediate challenge is to reduce and eliminate the number of cases in our communities. There is an answer to this challenge, and it is data—or as has been highlighted in the media—data related to testing and monitoring. In the town of Vò, Italy all residents were tested by researchers from the University of Padua and the Red Cross. Mass testing and selective isolation eliminated COVID-19 from the community of Vò.
Learning these lessons are key to tackling this terrible disease and defeating it. Applying them in the future will help prevent new pandemics from emerging and promote a healthier future for us all.
To support our clients, IBM has developed best practices and recommendations for actions to take now and after the pandemic. Click here to access our COVID-19 Action Guide and related resources.
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