Infectious disease research ‘alarmingly low’

Leading pharmaceutical companies are neglecting to address many other infectious diseases that pose a pandemic risk, amid a surge in research into COVID-19, a report has found. In the 20 drugs companies scrutinised by the Access to Medicine Foundation, there were empty R&D pipelines for ten out of 16 emerging diseases identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a threat to public health. The number of experimental drugs and vaccines targeting COVID-19 swelled from zero to 63 since the start of the pandemic in early 2020, the report found. However, there were only 13 projects focused on all the other infectious diseases put together, including five for Ebola and four each for Zika and chikungunya. The level of drug development is “alarmingly low” for these diseases, says the report, despite the WHO identifying them as priority diseases for R&D and the COVID-19 crisis highlighting the importance of readying strategies for potential outbreaks. Jayasree...