After binging on COVID-19, what have we missed?
By Daniel Bahcheli
As an Associate Director at RA Capital Management, Daniel Bahcheli guides the development of competitive landscapes of drugs and medical devices across a range of disease indications and capabilities.
August 11, 2021
After spending the past 16 months living through the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve still got COVID on the brain. No, I’m not referring to some kind of neurologic manifestation of ‘long COVID’ -- I just mean that everywhere I look I continue to see COVID-19 staring back at me. Some of what I see is good news, some of it bad news. Some of it is new, some of it old. But it still feels as if it’s all COVID, all the time.
To be clear, this single-minded focus on COVID-19 has largely been positive. The relentless pursuit of COVID-19 by the biotech industry and the larger scientific community has delivered modern-day miracles in the form of highly effective COVID-19 vaccines. The enormous potential of biomedical innovation has never felt more real to me than it has these past 16 months, and we owe a huge debt to those researchers who acted with a sense of urgency and discipline to make these game-changing scientific advances available to the rest of us.
That said, with the benefit of hindsight I can now see that my personal focus on COVID hasn’t always been productive, especially recently. Yes, I’ve used this as an opportunity to learn about this novel infectious disease and how to protect myself and my family, particularly during those early days of the pandemic. But given the seemingly endless supply of COVID-19-related content, it sometimes felt like I was passively binging on round-the-clock coverage that was more distracting than edifying. Recently this has caused me to reflect: what might I have missed while I was absorbed in COVID?
As it turns out, quite a lot.
AI is beginning to transform drug development
The speed at which the COVID-19 vaccines were conceived, designed, evaluated, and scaled up for widespread use surpassed my wildest expectations. Last year it felt as if the entire world was waiting, holding its breath while those first trials were conducted, and our collective relief was palpable when the topline data showed that the vaccines were highly effective.
Looking back, while some of the technology being used against COVID-19 was cutting edge, what actually facilitated this incredible pace of innovation was quite old fashioned: incredibly hard work by a large number of people. So many of us have benefited from this hard work and sacrifice, providing us yet another reason to focus our attention on emerging tools and approaches that could make the expedited timelines seen with COVID-19 vaccines the new normal.
There are myriad applications for machine learning and AI in drug discovery, and at this point it feels hard to imagine an aspect of biomedical innovation that won’t be meaningfully impacted by these technologies, with roles in drug design (e.g., predicting molecular structures and interactions with target proteins) and screening (predicting activity and toxicity profiles) but also downstream aspects such as quality assurance, optimizing clinical trial design, and even market analysis for late-stage drugs.
The Great Outdoors provide a needed reprieve
One bright spot of my own pandemic experience was rediscovering outdoor activities that I hadn’t made time for in recent years. I’ve loved hiking since I was a kid, and when the pandemic caused our usual hangouts in Boston to be off-limits I hit the trails again, this time with my own kid. Hiking with a 5-year old is different (pro tip: only walk as far as you would be comfortable traveling back with your child on your shoulders), but I was nonetheless surprised by how refreshing it felt to take a simple walk in the woods, and seeing these sights through my daughter’s eyes added a whole new dimension to the experience.
These days I’m feeling a new appreciation for parks and opportunities to be a bit closer to nature, and I know I’m not the only one. Although I’ll be happy to move on from many of my pandemic routines, I’ll be looking for opportunities to get out in nature more often even when the pandemic ends and life returns to a new normal. I felt the benefits of public outdoor spaces and state parks most acutely during our darkest days of the pandemic, but these places can bring so much enjoyment, even outside of a global health crisis.
I also hope that this new appreciation of the natural world leads to some practical actions to help preserve it. These places can be breathtaking and awe-inspiring, but they are also so fragile. This past year has brought record wildfires and heat waves here in the United States, as well as record flooding in Europe. These extreme weather events underscore how climate change threatens all of us, and recently they have hit closer to home; a few weeks ago, what would otherwise have been a perfectly good hiking day here in Massachusetts was marred by smoke from western fires burning thousands of miles away.
Although addressing climate change is very different from combating a novel infectious disease, there are also clear parallels. Solutions to both of these issues will require world-wide co-operation, new technologies, and real sacrifices. They will both disproportionately affect people living in low-income countries. And they will both require contributions from industry and government. I’m hopeful that a combination of new technologies and the collective will of the many people affected will lead to meaningful action.
Problems with vaccine access go far beyond COVID-19
While headlines about vaccines have focused almost exclusively on vaccinations against COVID-19, the broader vaccination effort had major setbacks as a result of the pandemic. An estimated ~23 million children missed basic childhood vaccinations last year. As the parent of two young children, that statistic cuts deep.
As with so many aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, my own family has been largely insulated from the worst effects. The pandemic has made the already-wide vaccine gap even wider, with negative effects that will largely fall on children living in remote and impoverished areas of the world. Ironically, though we often focus on what is ‘novel’ about SARS-CoV-2 and the many ‘variants of concern,’ some of the worst effects for children will be through indirect effects on access to vaccines for diseases that we’ve been battling for ages, such as polio, measles, and yellow fever.
Despite continued ups and downs, and official guidance that feels more like a zig-zag than a straight line, these days I do feel like we are trending in the right direction. I’m able to do some things now that seemed impossible even months ago. Winding down our lockdown, slowly but surely, has felt physically liberating for myself and my family. That said, these days we’re looking for ways to help liberate ourselves from the psychological effects of the pandemic as well. Ultimately, moving on from COVID-19 will require not only freeing ourselves from physical lockdowns but from ‘mental lockdowns’ as well.
As we approach the two-year mark since the COVID pandemic began, we’re trying to be more deliberate about where we invest our mental energy. I for one will be trying to make room for the many other important developments unfolding, instead of allowing myself to be all-consumed by any one story. Otherwise, who knows what else I might miss? Here again the path feels more like a zig-zag than a straight line, but it’s trending in the right direction.
