19. Breaking the Rules for A Breakthrough Drug Against Corona Virus Outbreak

In this week's episode (19), Angela Stoyanovitch, host of Legal Drugs Podcast, expands on episode 18's reflections of the corona virus pandemic that's shutting down the world right now.  Angela notes that there is also a great opportunity to break rules of play for what it takes to get a drug to market with this new and urgent #COVID19 crisis. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the U.S. has a compassionate drug use study (for Investigational New Drug or IND) for a new, unapproved drug to treat a seriously ill patient when no other treatments are available. Many biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies are working around the clock to come up with a new drug to cure or treat this disease.  This means some of the "rules" are being broken in order to come up with a breakthrough drug for this outbreak. Usually, it takes years to get a drug to market (10-20 years and $1-2B USD.) The process includes many years of animal testing, too.  Many biomedical researchers are concerned how quickly biotechnology is working towards a cure, perhaps skilling vital safety tests (in animals) before injecting into humans.  A lot is yet to be determined but two things remain true.  1) Corona virus is not a new virus, COVID19 is new. We have some previous research to go off of for this development. 2) With the use of deep machine learning, software and artificial intelligence for drug discovery and drug development, we can get a lot done in a shorter amount of time.  This pandemic may test the real issue of all time for the legal drug business which is how long will it take to get a vaccine or cure to market? For the latest updates on #COVID19, we recommend following the World Health Organization (WHO) on their website https://www.who.int. Become a patron member on patreon.com/legaldrugspodcast and get on the inside of Angela's reflections, sneak peaks and a hand-written postcard (if you'd like!) Thanks for listening from around the world to Legal Drugs Podcast. This episode edited and produced by Margaret Beveridge.