washingtonpost.com
on SARS
What will the demand be? Will the government purchase it? Nobody knows yet."
One area where private companies are expected to help immediately is in developing a rapid, accurate test for SARS infection, which could be used to limit spread and guide treatment. The technology likely to be most immediately useful in creating a test is controlled, in most parts of the world, by F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. of Basel, Switzerland. Heiner Dreismann, president of a subsidiary called Roche Molecular Systems, said the company is working on a diagnostic test and should have it ready for distribution to laboratories in eight weeks, though Roche remains uncertain how much demand there will be over the long term.
"This could be an attractive market for us, but it could also be no market at all," Dreismann said. Other companies may develop proprietary tests that would compete with the Roche technology.
Diagnostic tests are not particularly lucrative. The big money in SARS, if there is to be any, is likely to be in developing vaccines or antiviral drugs. A rapid vaccine of moderate effectiveness may be possible, researchers said, but an ideal vaccine will take two or three years, minimum, to develop.
Even further off would be drugs capable of suppressing the virus in people already infected. Researchers could get lucky and find that a drug already in animal or human testing is effective, which would shave years off the development time. Far more likely, executives said, is that they would have to synthesize anti-SARS drugs from scratch, then put them through arduous tests. Even with a crash program, the earliest such a drug could hit the market would be five years or so, the executives said. |
