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The nonprofit’s “Ready on Day 1” symposium showcased antiviral drug research that could prevent another pandemic.

READDI – or not? – for the next pandemic

Mr. Adams is a journalist in Atlanta who has written about the pharmaceutical industry. ATLANTA — Nine years ago, Dr. Dennis Liotta, a professor of organic chemistry at Emory University, set out to change the way drugs are developed for so-called neglected diseases — those that primarily affect populations in poorer countries and for which there exist few, if any, safe and effective treatments. “The cold hard truth is that it can cost billions of dollars and take decades to develop a new drug,” he said during a TEDx talk in 2016, shortly after the World Health Organization had declare...

The candidates that have been considered include remdesivir, originally developed to treat hepatitis C and Ebola. But Nature says that “some clinical studies have failed to confirm that it offers [Covid] patients any benefit. And the drug is expensive, difficult to manufacture and must be given intravenously in a hospital - all undesirable attributes in the middle of a pandemic.” Experts are hoping that some of those issues might be avoided with another antiviral drug, molnupiravir, which is undergoing late-stage clinical testing as a Covid treatment by the US National Institutes of Healt...