It seems to me that PSTI has a relationship with Thermo Fisher who was supposed to be building capacity, does anyone know how far they may have come.
As for the need, if proven in ventilator cases I've got to believe it will be given to people who are in better shape, hopefully preventing the needs for ventilators. The final step would be giving it to people just diagnosed with pneumonia to hopefully thwart it, never requiring hospitalization at all. The numbers naturally expand dramatically as millions annually develop pneumonia, most never requiring hospitalization.
Certainly the cost per patient will be higher than current treatment given at the onset of pneumonia, but if hospital stays and deaths is largely eliminated, the net cost should be substantially lower. I believe they'll see that it's wise to make this the SOC for treating pneumonia regardless of the source, but it will take time to reach that conclusion.
As I understand it, the current treatment for patients on ventilators involves many injections into muscles, I'm uncertain of precisely where. I believe they're not just covering the lungs, but other organs that coronavirus has been determined to attack by the time patient are on ventilator. This brings up the question about whether treatment might be diminished if intervention came earlier. It also brings up the question if treatment that still involved several shots in specific muscles is something nurses in most Doctors office, or the Doctor's themselves could administer, or if people would be sent to specialists on the determination they had pneumonia and the drug should be administered.
As I understand it, Doctors currently are administering the treatment to patients on ventilators, but I can't remember the last time I was given a shot by a Dr. Nurses have always done it for the Doctors I've been to, and even the administration of my stem cells was done by a nurse, no Dr. was in attendance at the time, they were just slowly introduced through my Hickman catheter. I guess the question is, does the placement of the drug require the precision only a specialist could provide, perhaps using ultrasound, or could any knowledgeable nurse be told these are the muscle groups that need to be injected, and easily be able to do it.
Regardless of how it must be done, and the pain that might be experienced by the patient in doing it, or mitigated by anesthetics, it's a treatment I believe most pneumonia patients would want if it greatly shortened the time to a cure and diminished the likelihood of it worsening and possibly becoming life threatening. If I'm correct about that, sales of the drug for only pneumonia should go into double digit billions or more.
Gary
AI
