CNBC’s Meg Tirrell Answers The Questions Everyone’s Asking About Cures And Treatments

Summary: With <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/meg-tirrell/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Meg Tirrell</a>, Senior Health and Science Reporter for CNBC<br> To get a good idea of what drug companies are doing to create tests, treatments, and vaccines for the coronavirus, Steve spoke with <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/meg-tirrell/">Meg Tirrell</a>, the Senior Health and Science reporter at CNBC. Meg has tracked public health emergencies from Ebola to Zika, so she has plenty of experience with pandemics.<br> Testing For The Coronavirus<br> Steve and Meg first talked about where we are on testing for the coronavirus. Meg reported that “testing capacity has ramped up dramatically in the United States from where it was. Now commercial companies have come in and the US is running something like more than a hundred thousand new tests per day. That’s still not enough. What everybody says is we need to have a much greater testing capacity if we’re going to be starting the economy back up again. We need to be able to know who’s infected, where the outbreaks are.”<br> But there are still problems with the testing infrastructure, such as shortages of supplies needed to do the tests, things like swabs and protective equipment for people doing the testing. There’s a lot of variation in how well different states are doing as far as testing (Meg noted that Florida has done an excellent job so far on testing and on reporting test results) and, in Meg’s opinion, there needs to be more national coordination and guidance from the top.<br> Steve noted he had read one of the problems was hospitals’ reluctance to switch testing platforms. Meg agreed that that is one of the problems. Roche tests were available in the early stage to the hospitals, so when Abbott came out later with a large supply, many facilities were slow or reluctant to make the change.<br> Steve also pointed out that getting the economy open and running again is probably going to be heavily dependent on increased and better testing abilities, including the ability to do multiple tests and get fast results. According to Meg, “One of the new areas of technology that’s emerging is antibody tests—that’s a test to determine if you’ve been infected in the past and have developed antibodies that make you immune to the virus. But it still needs to be proven that you can’t be re-infected right away with this virus. Abbott just announced that it’s going to be launching an antibody test and that it’ll be supplying millions of tests in the U.S. by June. A lot of people are very hopeful that that will be kind of a passport showing you have immunity, so you can be back out in the world.” Steve had the idea that people could possibly have something like a QR code on their cell phone showing that they’re clear of infection.<br> Coronavirus Treatments<br> Steve asked Meg to do a quick recap of an earlier conversation they had about a possible treatment or vaccine drug being developed by the biotech company, Regeneron. Here’s the latest on Regeneron’s efforts from Meg: “Regeneron has a couple of different approaches and they’re moving incredibly quickly. The first is an antibody approach where they’re actually developing a brand-new drug for COVID-19. The way they’re doing that is with these mice that they’ve genetically engineered to have human immune systems. They essentially expose these mice to the novel coronavirus to get them to develop an immune response. They’re taking those antibodies that the mice generate and sifting through them to find the best ones that could be a potential medicine. This is an approach that they used successfully for Ebola and there is a lot of hope they’ll be able to do it again here. And they’ve accelerated their timelines on being able to get into doing human trials by early summer.