The global pandemic has certainly been costly, claiming nearly a million lives and an untold amount of lost economic activity since the outbreak emerged in Wuhan, China, late last year. How can we do better next time?
The experts, speaking at a virtual Fortune event Tuesday afternoon, weighed what will be required, from basic preparation to radical innovation and global collaboration, and what is to be gained in the current moment.
“We should never have had this pandemic,” said Paul Stoffels, Johnson & Johnson’s chief scientific officer. “We could have done a lot more. And that’s what the future should bring. Everyone is ready to fight wars, but nobody is ready to fight wars with biology. But I think we are ready to do this: the science is there; the capabilities are there. Let’s get ready to make this the next wave of innovation. “
Regina Dugan, CEO of Wellcome Leap and former CEO of DARPA, agreed with that assessment. He added: “It is not a coincidence that new waves of transformation happen and arise from these very difficult situations. I have a feeling that just as we had a new commitment to innovation after Sputnik, this coronavirus could trigger, not a space age, but an age of health. And that is going to require a lot of us. But it is certainly within our ability to do so. “
One area where he envisioned radical innovation is the way clinical trials are conducted. Rather than conducting time-consuming and expensive drug or vaccine studies with tens of thousands of human volunteers, he suggested we could use tissue and organ engineering strategies.
“This is important, not only for the lives that will be saved, but also for the economic damage. If we save a month on the clinical trial, we will avoid economic damages worth 300,000 million dollars. He also noted that such a strategy could address the equity and representation issues that clinical trial researchers grapple with, as it could study the vaccine in all types of populations.
Trevor Bedford, associate professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, proposed better surveillance systems for infectious diseases. He also noted that legacy data systems that don’t easily communicate with each other, as well as the wrong regulatory policies, had slowed down the response to US COVID and could be vastly improved.
Stoffels, a veteran of the pharmaceutical industry who has been at the forefront of many outbreaks, from HIV to Ebola to Zika, highlighted one last point from his years in the field. “The world’s attention is only there when it threatens Western countries,” he said, noting that J&J had to stop its work on a Zika vaccine that was once urgently needed because there was no interest in it. “Zika can return at any time… The seeds of many of these viruses are found in parts of the world [that do not receive] care. They could start to grow and expand, and before we know it, it’s a global problem. We have to be citizens of the world, have the conscience, but also the perceptions and commitment to not only work when it reaches the shores of the United States, but to work much earlier. “
Dugan agreed: “We need to recognize that there are certain kinds of problems … We are just not going to solve them within national borders. We need new strategies, new organizations, new collaborations, and we need the commitment of our leaders to facilitate those kinds of interactions. We will have to solve those problems together. “
