It actually looks really interesting @popeye, & I think that you are referring to the COVID-19 study in patients who are in ICU with a ‘dismal’ prognosis? This infusion worked well b4 in Graft vs Host reactions in transplants in a similar inflammatory response in a Ph3? It’s definitely worth the trial & MSB is to be commended for their breakthroughs. I’m sorry, I can’t give an opinion on something I don’t know much about, however these are the patients who will be receiving these high cost drugs (free) for clinical trials, in hope it will save their lives & assist science moving forward to find effective treatments for COVID-19.
The inflammatory process & Cytokine ‘storm’ that is killing patients, there are multiple clinical trials here & globally in the pipeline for many treatments surrounding COVID-19 to address this, and others to prevent people becoming so unwell & maybe in the future to help survivors recover if they have been very sick.
So just to tie that into what PIQ are doing here & looking at biomarkers, (why some people get really sick & others don’t), they are not in competition with Pharmas or any trials like what MSB are doing, more the opposite & look at treatment identification before life threatening disease & possibly what will work, IDK? Or processing blood samples for Clinical Trials. As I said, there are many in the pipeline for Australia included, so we potentially may be involved with multiple research institutions & Pharma trials. At the moment a big question mark.
Also, just an update on Rapid Test Kits from NSW Health due to media interest: They are doing multiple analyses & to choose words carefully, they aren’t helpful for diagnosis of active cases, as far as a laboratory perspective, although they are important & as I still think, will be very useful for identifying recovered cases via antibody detection in a less invasive way than drawing blood in pathology collection.
As suspected, these tests cannot confirm active viral cases vs recovered, they do however give an indication of coming in contact & development of antibodies & potentially, immunity or to give an indication of unidentified infection rates ie mass testing, particularly in children. Where standard pathology collection via needle is both traumatic & time consuming. I’m sure we will be seeing studies in the near future in order to reveal the “real” numbers. An interesting study from Iceland in the news, also an island nation:
Also rural & remote, this may give a heads up to positive symptoms & actions to take to protect close contacts from infection, when results may take longer to arrive on confirmation of swabs from lab. There are positives there for sure, but I think right at this point in time, Swabs (PCR), a Medical assessment & Vital signs observations will remain the mainstay of screening for active cases of COVID-19.
So all tests will have their place & meaning for COVID-19, IMO. Have a great weekend all
PIQ Price at posting:
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