https://magazine.medlineplus.gov/article/research-is-the-key-insights-from-nih-director-dr-francis-collins
.. I called up a lot of my colleagues in academia and in industry, and in a very short period of time, we assembled a group to talk about whether all sectors could become real partners in this effort. After an initial positive discussion, it took just two weeks for this partnership to come into being. It's called ACTIV. This has intensely involved about a hundred people, about half of them from industry and half from government and academia. They pretty much dropped everything else. They organized themselves into four very intense working groups on preclinical issues, clinical issues, clinical trials, and vaccines. The Foundation for NIH provided expert program management, which made the whole enterprise work remarkably well.
All of that has now gotten us to the point where we do know a lot of treatments that don't work—and that's really important—and a few that really do: remdesivir, dexamethasone, high-dose heparin for hospitalized patients, and monoclonal antibodies for outpatients. That's a pretty impressive menu, but it's not big enough. We're still deep into that, even a year later, because this is not over and we want to be sure we have tested every idea.
How is NIH research tackling the issue of mental health right now?
There are so many consequences of COVID-19 that have made life extremely difficult for everybody across the world, and certainly that includes the U.S. Hardly anyone has been untouched, whether it is by their own illness or that of a family member, the economic distress that's fallen on so many people, or consequences of isolation and being in a circumstance that none of us expected would be part of our daily life but now is. You can't look at this circumstance and not [see] that [an impact on] mental health is one of the big consequences of COVID-19. Certainly, surveys have shown that the vast majority of people are feeling significant stress.
NIH, of course, has an entire institute to devoted to these issues—the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)—and NIMH has worked hard to get information out there about resources that can help people who are struggling with anxiety, depression, and fear.
This won't be our last pandemic, so we need to identify what we can learn from this and what kind of interventions would be most helpful for people who are going through this kind of struggle, both now and in the future. So, as part of our agenda, along with vaccines and drugs that might be effective treatments, we also need the mental health issues to get the same kind of attention. We're working hard on that. Josh Gordon [M.D., Ph.D.], the director of NIMH, has been front and center, and is helping to design the next generation of pandemic research studies at NIMH.
Many people have been working around the clock on the vaccine and other COVID-19 research. Who are some of the NIH heroes who are part of this process?
There are many! Some of the first who come to mind are those at NIH's Vaccine Research Center (VRC) who, within a day after the posting of the sequence of the genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, went about designing what the vaccine would look like. They built on work they had pursued for many years, using messenger RNA as the way in which the vaccine could be developed. Then they collaborated with the company Moderna. And within 63 days of the initial posting of the viral genome sequence, the first patient was getting injected with a phase 1 vaccine. Among those VRC heroes are Kizzmekia Corbett [Ph.D.], Barney Graham [M.D., Ph.D.], and John Mascola [M.D.], who led that effort under Tony Fauci [M.D.]'s able oversight. And look where we are now. ..