Business as usual only three months ago has transformed into health care industry overdrive as biopharma and med-tech companies scramble to test and scale-up treatments, vaccines and diagnostics to address COVID-19.

LONDON – COVID-19 excepted, biomedical research projects and clinical trials are grinding to a halt across Europe, as universities shut down and administrators stop any work not related to the coronavirus.

HONG KONG – Korean biopharma Celltrion Inc. said it’s halfway through the process of creating a super antibody to reign in the COVID-19 novel coronavirus that has claimed almost 13,000 lives globally.

DUBLIN—Can high-dose inhaled nitric oxide (NO) make a meaningful contribution to patients with COVID-19 infection? The FDA was sufficiently persuaded by the data presented by Bellerophon Therapeutics Inc. to grant it expanded access approval for its iNOpulse system for pulmonary delivery of NO.

President Donald Trump has issued an executive order enabling the Defense Production Act, which gives the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services broader leeway to conscript industrial production to deal with the COVID-19 outbreak.

LONDON – As the epicenter of the COVID-19 epidemic shifted to Europe and the number of deaths in Italy exceeded the toll in China, the EU stepped up efforts to mount a coordinated response, with a big boost for collaborative R&D funding and a call for clinical research to be pooled in multicenter, multi-arm randomized controlled trials.

The U.S. capacity for SARS-CoV-2 testing is limited by several items, including the swabs used to collect patient specimens, but the supply of reagents has been front and center recently. Despite those concerns, several private test makers said they are quickly ramping up production, including Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., of Waltham, Mass., which said it has enough supplies of all types on hand to provide 2 million reactions per week, a volume that should increase to 5 million per week in April.

As the world goes to war with COVID-19, the U.S. is ripping open the purse strings to fund mobilization against both the coronavirus and the economic devastation it’s causing.

HONG KONG – South Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) recently granted the first urgent-use licenses to four COVID-19 novel coronavirus diagnostic kits to battle the pandemic in the country, which is home to one of the largest outbreaks in the world outside of China.

Chronic disease patients are facing serious risks both from keeping away from necessary care settings, as well as from potential COVID-19 infection. One in five chronic disease patients was already starting to avoid seeking care in physician’s offices and hospitals, according to a survey that started early last week of a panel of 1,300 chronic disease patients across several indications.