Using real-world data to accelerate the search for long COVID therapies

Long COVID, a spectrum of symptoms and syndromes that can develop after SARS-COV-2 infection, can significantly affect patients' health, quality of life and impact their ability to productively function in society. There is currently no approved therapy for Long COVID and there is an urgent need for rigorous clinical trials to find such treatments. Although research into the pathophysiology of Long COVID is advancing, investigations into treatment for patients remain underfunded and, as a result, understudied. Owing to the urgency of the Long COVID pandemic and as a research collaborative across a diversity of biomedical innovation value propositions, we are calling for a new approach that parallelizes pathophysiologic and therapeutic research into this condition, leveraging patient-centered research and real-world data to generate hypotheses to assess the effectiveness of existing FDA approved drugs. Accelerated discovery of therapeutics for Long COVID can then be confirmed through efficient and cost-effective adaptive platform clinical trials.