The US just made a $250 million investment in speeding up coronavirus tests. Here are the 7 companies that got the cash.Healey & AMG Center scientists were already preparing to take on a whole new way of conducting their work even before the pandemic hit. " which allows them to test several drugs in different people at the same time. It has been used to develop cancer treatments and, according to proponents, cuts the time to find an effective treatment in half and cuts costs by a third.
Doing the study this way means drugs are tested against a single placebo group, and scientists can evaluate results simultaneously. If one drug is working particularly well, then scientists can switch patients to a different drug or do a combination. Science 37, a virtual-trials startup once eyed by Alphabet's Verily, just raised $40 million to push the drug industry decades into the future
Under previous methods, scientists tested one drug at a time. That meant if a drug failed then a lot of time would pass before scientists could start over with another trial. "The idea was that there's such a big pipeline in ALS and the current approach of testing drugs is so inefficient that we wanted to do a better way," Cudkowicz said. "We went to the FDA with three people from three companies and all sat in the same room together to talk about this," she said. "And it doesn't maybe sound like much, but that never happens."
The three different drugs they've begun testing were developed by UCB Ra Pharmaceuticals in Massachusetts, Biohaven Pharmaceutical Holding Company in Connecticut, and Clene Nanomedicine in Utah. The medicines are administered through a shot, a pill, and a liquid that's swallowed, respectively.of Israel and another from Implicit Bioscience of Australia. Researchers selected the handful of medicines after beginning with a list of almost 30 applications.