New York-based Deerfield Management Co. has secured $840 million for a new venture capital fund to support innovations in biotechnology, medical technologies and digital health. James Flynn, managing partner of Deerfield, said roughly half of the fund will focus on early-stage therapeutic R&D, much of that coming from academic partnerships. The remainder will be used to back companies developing novel advances in med-tech interventions, diagnostics and digital health.

“In any crisis, leaders have two equally important responsibilities: solve the immediate problem and keep it from happening again... The first point is more pressing, but the second has crucial long-term consequences.” So wrote Bill Gates in a February editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine about COVID-19, which “has started behaving a lot like the once-in-a-century pathogen we’ve been worried about.”

As the demand increases for ventilators to treat Americans with severe symptoms of COVID-19, another shortage is being exacerbated – a shortage of the drugs needed to treat patients on ventilators.

Many adaptations to the coronavirus pandemic will remain standard features of health care long after the pandemic wanes, according to Brian Chapman, managing partner at ZS Associates, an Evanston, Ill.-based pharmaceutical and medical technology consultancy. In the long term, telehealth will be a clear winner as payers look to lower ongoing costs, more procedures and care will move out of hospitals, rapid diagnostics will gain importance, and government and payer coverage of infectious disease testing of all kinds will expand, he predicted.

The emergence of the new variety of coronavirus has had a massive effect on medical care across the globe, which has boosted telehealth coverage while suppressing non-emergency procedures. Several medical societies have published guidelines for procedures during the COVID-19 outbreak, however, which in the aggregate suggest that many procedures will be significantly delayed.