STRATEGY
WHERE ARE WE HEADING IN 2022? COVID-19 has caused medical, social, and economic havoc globally and triggered an unprecedented development of therapeutics and prophylactics for its eradication. Difficulties in vaccine distribution and acceptance and new potentially more transmissible SARS-CoV-2 variants have slowed down the progress. The prospects of COVID-19 for 2022 and beyond are discussed here. Kenneth Lundstrom, PanTherapeutics
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P H A RM A F O C U S A S I A
ISSUE 46 - 2022
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OVID-19 has posed an unprecedented threat to the health and economy globally since its first detection in December 2019 with more than 435 million cases and 5.9 million deaths (as of February 27, 2022). The impressive co-operation between academic institutions, pharmaceutical and biotech companies, and governmental organisations has resulted in never-before-seen progress on many fronts. Especially, vaccine development has been swift with the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of both adenovirus- and mRNA-based vaccines and the FDA approval of the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine in August 2021. The development of efficient antiviral drugs has turned out to be more difficult. For this reason, one approach has been to develop repurposed drugs, previously approved for viral and tropical diseases.
