For discussion I'm reposting @ScottG's very interesting comments on COVIDROPS and, by implication, Sorrento's whole COVID pipeline:
"I'm not sure you need scientific/medical knowledge to have a decent opinion on this, except for one or two use cases. Let's consider...
* If you didn't get a vaccine, for whatever reason, and end up getting COVID, you're going to want a treatment, of which there are several. However, as yet there's no good solid early stage treatments that are considered high probability successful options. We've seen a variety of drugs used at several stages that seem to have had at least some positive outcomes, but they require high dosages, typically delivered via IV, and are expensive. If a couple of nasal drops are proven to truly be effective, that's an easy choice for any doctor.
* If you got a vaccine, but still get COVID and it seems to be progressing past mild or even if it's mild and doesn't go away in a few days, then you're also headed for a therapeutic 'cure' if you can get one.
* Let's look a the whole world for a moment... Across the Rich World, (however you choose to define that), anyone who wants a vaccine will probably have one within the next 12 month; give or take a couple of months either way. And those shots will last... well... we don't know. So, (leaving aside the anti vax folks who don't get a shot), meanwhile, BILLIONS in the poor countries will still be at risk. Which means, they keep passing it around and when immunity for others wears off, this thing comes roaring back. So, assuming it will take several more years to dose the billions of poor in poorer countries, to knock this thing down and avoid resurgence, when outbreaks happen the ability to knock it out quickly will be key. Regardless what anyone thinks about foreign aid, it's in the world's best interest to pay for a C-130 or whatever full of Covi-drops to set up wherever this thing bursts out and try to knock it down.
* Next, your vaccinated. It's 1.5 - 2 years later. Studies come to show - for as yet unknown reasons - 30% of people are no longer sporting effective immunity. They'll need therapeutics. (And so yeah, testing will be needed - likely at decent scale - for years; perhaps a decade or more, until or unless we can effectively eradicate. Which we've done before, as with smallpox. But it takes a worldwide effort.)
Briefly, this drug is desperately needed NOW, regardless of having even effective vaccines and will be useful for a long time. The market for it might not be as massive as if we had no vaccines. But it's still there. Moreover, it's one incredible endorsement for the company that understands the disease well enough to produce multiple solutions.
One Wildcard: If vaccines, (or some of them anyway), don't work against some variants, but this does, then it becomes one of the most important drugs of our modern times.
I'm sure I'm missing some use cases. But there you go."
"The refusal of the real is the number one dogma of our time" Rene Girard
AI
