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MedPage Today: '
Monica Bertagnolli: U.S. 'Ready' for Next Pandemic Threat’
Faust: And in terms of long COVID, everyone always asks about this, there's a lot of funding. Where do you see this headed in the next few years?
Bertagnolli: It's a terrible, terrible condition. Post-infectious, chronic post-infectious syndromes have been around as long as there've been viruses in humans and it is a really, really terrible affliction when someone develops one of these conditions. COVID has introduced a whole new level of this in our society. The fundamental biology that's been conducted by the long COVID research team is really fascinating but also sobering. The agent can live for a long time in tissues. It can surround nerve cells, probably likely one of the ways that it produces some of its terrible symptoms such as the dysautonomia. And we have no effective way of eradicating it. Not yet.
We see evidence of persistent live virus in humans in various tissue reservoirs, including surrounding nerves, the brain, the GI [gastrointestinal] tract, to the lung.
Our emerging data shows that the virus can persist into tissues in the long term, and I think that's really critical because it does help us think about possible ways to combat it, one being better antivirals. I think there's a lot of focus on developing new antivirals as a possible way of preventing long COVID, and the other might be more aggressive treatment with antiviral therapy upon initial diagnosis.