Listed biotech CSL's chief medical officer has warned governments and the healthcare industry against repeating the mistakes made after the 2003 SARS epidemic, in their quest to find a vaccine for the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak.
Momentum must be maintained when it comes to unlocking knowledge about coronavirus, even if the pandemic ends, warned the chief medical officer at CSL Behring."I hope we are not in a situation as we were after the SARS-Cov-1 infection where there was enthusiasm, there was a lot of work done and there were novel approaches taken to developing vaccines, and as that pandemic fell off, the interest for it dissipated.
Dr Gittleson also said she was hopeful the pandemic would "highlight the value of integrated data and the ability to access data quickly" at a time when researchers were collaborating across borders and corporations to battle the coronavirus pandemic.
She added that global advances in research on the virus had led to new approaches, saying that the path to clinical trials for vaccines in the United States was developing at an "unprecedented speed"."We are seeing a willingness to try novel things really quickly and to change things," she said.