Over 718 drugs in pipeline as potential COVID-19 treatments, says report

According to a new report, there are now over 718 pipeline drugs associated with COVID-19 and 70 percent of these drugs are in discovery or pre-clinical stages.

The research was conducted by GlobalData, which also found that there are currently over 583 companies and institutions driving prophylactic and curative innovation.

Johanna Swanson, Product Manager at GlobalData, commented: “These drugs include combinations of novel agents and repurposed drugs and new ones are added daily as new studies are announced or completed at a rapid rate.”

Additionally, there are 164 strategic partnerships, 46 licensing agreements and 26 financing deal-making activities involved with the development of COVID-19 therapies. The researchers say this activity demonstrates the constantly changing strategic landscape of the pharmaceutical COVID-19 response. Research published on COVID-19 shows the same rapid pace, with a doubling every two weeks of the number of papers published.

Swanson added: “The issues surrounding this large amount of information can be overcome with dashboards that show trends over time and the latest updates for specific COVID-19 data. Additionally, artificial intelligence has high promise to mine this data and to pull out relevant information. Natural language processing can be used to analyse all these scientific papers on COVID-19 and extract relevant information. These can use machine learning to filter on what the researcher is interested in.”