Tonix Pharmaceuticals Holding Corp. is looking to lessons from tuberculosis and smallpox to guide its future in infectious diseases. The company is developing an intradermal skin test like that used for TB to measure T-cell immunity to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. It also has three vaccines in development for COVID-19 that rely on horsepox, likely the form of vaccinia used by Edward Jenner to create the smallpox vaccine.

COLOMBIA – South Korea’s molecular diagnostics firm Seegene Inc. is expanding operations in the Brazilian market after Anvisa, the country's health care surveillance agency, cleared its multi-assay product through a COVID-19 emergency pathway. Seegene manufactures Allplex, a SARS-CoV-2/FluA/FluB/RSV test able to screen and differentiate eight targets.

Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings (Labcorp) reported its financial performance for the fourth quarter of 2020, which included a jump in revenues of 52%, a result enabled in part by its quick response to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, Labcorp said that revenues related to pandemic testing could decline by anywhere from 35% to 50% over the course of calendar year 2021.

Governments across the globe are struggling to keep pace with the SARS-CoV-2 virus’s impact on public health, but the new variants are presenting their own challenges. The next task facing governments across the globe is to sequence the latest mutated variants of the virus and keep track of any further mutations, all while validating new and revamped existing tests, a task that is likely to prove difficult to meet for at least the next few months.

As COVID-19 variants have emerged, so have questions about the effectiveness of tests for infection. While the risk of mutations significantly limiting their ability to detect the novel coronavirus is thought to be relatively low, companies that make COVID-19 tests are moving quickly to enhance and revalidate their products.

By mid-January 2021, the U.K., South Africa and Brazil had confirmed that “variants of concern” were driving massive surges in COVID-19 cases in their countries. Once alerted, other nations found these troubling strains rapidly multiplying within their populations as well. At the time, the world had reported 90 million cases, creating abundant opportunities for the coronavirus to mutate. Of those cases, the virus in just 360,000 had been sequenced – and nearly all of them from just a handful of countries.

As of the end of January, SARS-CoV-2 has demonstrably infected more than 100 million individuals globally. It has killed more than 2 million. And the long-term sequelae of COVID infections – to say nothing of the health consequences of grief, social isolation and widespread economic distress – are still unfolding and will be for years to come.