from Hacker News

Project Covalence

by dmnd on 6/16/20, 5:09 PM with 31 comments

• by simonebrunozzi on 6/16/20, 6:07 PM

  Hmm, sounds more like a PR statement rather than the usual (insightful) posts that Sam writes. Anyway...

  > Project Covalence’s platform, powered by TrialSpark, is uniquely optimized to support COVID-19 trials, which are ideally run in community settings or at the patient’s home to reduce the burden placed on hospitals and health systems.

  What's a "platform" in this case? I'd love to read simpler words. Is it a... piece of software to coordinate things? A physical machine? Else?

• by chintan on 6/16/20, 10:51 PM

  Great initiative! There needs to be more effort towards streamlining these trials.

  At TrialX [1], we also launched Covid Labs Initiative to Hack The Pandemic [2] by bringing together hackers in Clinical Trials informatics space - Drop us a note hackcovid@trialx.com if interested.

  We are seeing an unprecedented activity on-the-ground at various orgs[3,4,5] where we power the clinical trials recruitment. There is a huge interest in patient/volunteer community. Any effort to streamline and accelerate would be welcome.

  1. https://trialx.com

  2. https://trialx.com/covid-labs/

  3. https://www.pennmedicine.org/coronavirus/covid-19-clinical-t...

  4. https://www.centerwatch.com/covid-19-treatment-information

  5. https://clinicaltrials.med.nyu.edu/clinicaltrials/?keyword=C...

• by dzink on 6/16/20, 8:15 PM

  Why set up a separate brand to funnel COVID trial business to TrialSpark? From their own site, TrialSpark is a VC-backed company which primarily runs trials for major drug companies to recruit more patients with painful chronic conditions (like Astma, COPD, Diabetes, inflammatory, skin problems etc, but not cancer)for drug studies. The highly profitable medical areas are clearly attractive for Pfizer, but the sales pitch of TrialSpark is to identify high cluster areas of a disease in small communities, recruit community doctors and incentivize them to attract patients to drug studies with 1.9x higher than usual conversion rate.

  So why the separate brand?

• by jxramos on 6/16/20, 7:45 PM

  I've actually been wondering as covid19 winds down and people's lived experiences no longer perceive it as the doom and gloom threat it once held sway with, if given that perception whether the market rewards will continue to stand and attract massive investments in pursuit of a vaccine where the rewards may not outweigh the risks.

  I would think that would be a pretty strong signal that covid is not as large a risk if big industries don't think it worthwhile to pursue any longer. Along those lines of thinking have any of the big pharmaceutical companies given serious pursuit of a vaccine or is it mainly smaller outfits?

• by DiabloD3 on 6/16/20, 5:28 PM

  Good luck with that, Sam.

• by hairytrog on 6/16/20, 7:58 PM

  It is now clear that Covid-19 is not as dangerous as was thought and hyped by media and governments worldwide, and that the prescribed shutdown cure has been and will be much worse than the disease itself. Please see (https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/) for a pretty clear summary or follow Aaron Ginn. Covid-19 vaccine development is nearly useless at this point. That said, we need countermeasures and resilience to such events in the future.

  The expectation is we may be well be in 50% to 100% infection rate if serology yield is 1/5. Pretty scary. This means the disease was extremely rapid, and we would've been absolutely trashed if it had been significantly more lethal. We need to invest massively on R&D against such potential threats. Covid-19 shows that state control wouldn't have done much to prevent global devastation, and that state control can itself cause the devastation. We need technological countermeasures such as one week vaccine development and deployment or transition to more separate economic spheres with permanent and complete travel bans and highly controlled trade between countries or geographic regions.