The Long COVID Cure Initiative
at PolyBio Research Foundation
Our Mission
To deliver treatments to millions of Long COVID patients by translating key academic findings into real-world diagnostic tests, faster and more targeted clinical trials, and accessible patient-ready therapies.
Our PolyBio LCCI strategy
Validate Diagnostics
Commercialize Diagnostics
Mobilize Smarter Trials
Scale Clinical Adoption
Result: millions of patients receive viable treatments years sooner
The Long COVID Cure Initiative (LCCI) is built to:
Accelerate the Timeline to Clinical Adoption of Treatments
By building the missing infrastructure across diagnostics, trials, commercialization, and clinical adoption, LCCI starts to deliver validated diagnostics and clinical trial results in the next 1-5 years, with knowledge of what works built directly into broadscale medical education – bringing treatments to patients decades sooner than the current trajectory.
Broaden the Long COVID Treatment Portfolio
Instead of 1–2 narrow therapies that may only manage symptoms (our current trajectory), LCCI enables multiple treatments targeting multiple root causes of Long COVID to be trialed and approved over the next decade, greatly increasing the likelihood that patients can be matched to an effective therapy.
Unlock Public and Private Investment
By validating diagnostics and de-risking trials, LCCI makes Long COVID a tractable and investable area for biotech and pharma. This enables our ~$100M (5-year) philanthropic budget to unlock $300M+ in follow-on investment (both public and private), accelerating the development of additional treatments beyond what philanthropy alone could fund.
Without PolyBio
Few validated diagnostics for Long COVID
Limited pharmaceutical engagement
Limited non-targeted treatments
With PolyBio
Diagnostics for multiple Long COVID biological subgroups
Millions in pharma engagement and R&D
Many targeted Long COVID treatments
Our Solution: The Long COVID Cure Initiative
The Long COVID Cure Initiative (LCCI) bridges the gap from academic research to real-world uptake via a targeted four-step plan that integrates diagnostic test validation, commercialization, clinical trial acceleration, and targeted medical education into a single coordinated platform. Each step is designed to remove bottlenecks that currently slow progress – cutting red tape, reducing coordination failures, and accelerating the path from research to real-world care. Our goal is that LCCI will turn scientific progress into effective treatments, delivered to millions of patients years sooner than would otherwise be possible.
Overview: Many promising diagnostic tests for Long COVID are being developed in research labs, but remain unvalidated, non-standardized, and unavailable for use in clinical trials or patient care. VIPER addresses this gap by systematically identifying and validating the most promising diagnostics – including tests for SARS-CoV-2 persistence, immune dysfunction, and other core biological drivers of disease. By rigorously testing the most promising diagnostics head-to-head, VIPER identifies which tests truly work – providing the clarity needed to guide clinical trials and treatment decisions.
Learn more about Validate Diagnostics (VIPER)
Program Outcomes
- Validated, trial-ready Long COVID diagnostic platforms that reliably identify key biological drivers and patient subgroups
- Diagnostics capable of guiding targeted clinical trials and treatment decisions, reducing trial failure risk
- 10+ year acceleration to validated diagnostics compared to the current path of fragmented, lab-by-lab validation
Overview: Even when diagnostics are scientifically validated, many stall at the point of commercialization – lacking the business, regulatory, and operational support needed to actually be ordered by doctors in a clinic. Our goal is to move VIPER and other validated diagnostics from the lab into clinical practice so that patients can access reliable tests, trials can be biomarker-guided, and health systems can deliver targeted care at scale.
To maximize this process, our commercialization engine program will catalyze the transition of diagnostic tests from academic research labs through successful commercialization, ensuring that validated tests are able to achieve outside investment and maximally reach patients. Our commercialization advisory board of top experts will provide VIPER diagnostic and related teams with access to strategic partners, guidance on regulatory and intellectual property strategy, and access to capital, ensuring validated diagnostics become real clinical products, not stalled discoveries.
Program Outcomes
- Multiple Long COVID diagnostics are commercialized, via new companies or industry partnerships
- 15+ years acceleration from scientific validation to real-world adoption
- Follow-on private investment unlocked, de-risking pharma and diagnostics industry engagement
Overview: Current Long COVID trials often fail because they lump heterogeneous patients into one single treatment group. In other words, they do not account for the fact that there are multiple drivers of Long COVID (e.g. SARS-CoV-2 persistence, immune dysfunction, clotting problems), each of which require specialized therapy.
To fix this situation, we will use validated VIPER diagnostics to appropriately select and track Long COVID patients into strategic trials of drugs – or combinations of drugs – targeting different disease drivers. This will greatly increase the chance that patients are paired with therapies that improve their specific symptoms, increasing industry’s willingness to bring targeted therapeutics into the space, and upping the chance that trial drugs successfully gain FDA approval.
To accelerate running Long COVID trials as quickly and effectively as possible, we are building a national, diagnostics-guided, clinical trials network purpose-built for Long COVID. By standardizing trial endpoints and embedding validated diagnostics into trial design, the network allows trials to enroll faster and generate clearer, decision-ready results – incentivizing greater pharmaceutical investment while accelerating the path to effective treatments. The network will provide funding and/or capital for:
- Clinical trials of repurposed generic drugs (including combination therapies): A number of potentially effective generic drugs for Long COVID are effectively “stuck on the shelf” – the fact that they are affordable and generic is exactly why no pharma companies are paying for them to be trialed. Our support will move these trials forward, allowing any drugs that work to be quickly and affordably delivered to patients.
- Industry-led trial of novel medications: Despite strong scientific rationale, many promising Long COVID therapeutics fail to advance because early industry entry is too risky, slow, or capital-intensive. We will address that gap by de-risking early-stage industry involvement – supporting industry-led trials and novel therapeutics that would otherwise stall.
Program Outcomes
- Multiple effective Long COVID treatments for different disease drivers identified, spanning both repurposed generics and industry-led therapies
- Faster, higher-quality clinical trial results, reducing uncertainty and trial failure risk
- Increased pharma engagement, driven by validated diagnostics, clearer endpoints, and de-risked trial infrastructure
Overview: Even when diagnostics and treatments are validated, adoption into routine care is often slow, uneven, and limited to specialist centers. The CoRE Clinic at Mount Sinai will serve as the national distribution engine for VIPER diagnostics and LCCI treatments. By embedding VIPER/LCCI findings into a Continuing Medical Education (CME)- accredited program, CoRE will convert research breakthroughs into routine clinical practice – rapidly and at scale. As validated diagnostics and therapies emerge, they will be immediately integrated into medical education training modules and standard clinical guidelines, ensuring physicians nationwide know what to test, how to interpret results, and how to treat patients effectively.
Program Outcomes:
- 7,000+ clinicians trained per year
- Broad clinical adoption accelerated by 5+ years
- Rapid national penetration of new standards of care, ensuring that once treatments are validated, patients gain timely access across academic centers, community clinics, and primary care settings
Platform Expansion: Applying the LCCI Model Beyond Long COVID
LCCI is designed as an execution platform, not a one-off disease program. If successful in Long COVID, the same infrastructure – validated diagnostics, diagnostics-guided trials, commercialization pathways, and clinician adoption – can be applied to other infection-associated chronic illnesses that share similar biological and systemic bottlenecks. Potential future areas include chronic Lyme and other vector-borne diseases, Epstein-Barr virus–associated chronic conditions like multiple sclerosis, aging and longevity, and related infection-driven chronic illnesses where PolyBio already has scientific and clinical relationships.
Unlocking the Cure to Long COVID
Long COVID represents one of the largest unmet medical needs of our time – not because solutions are unknowable, but because the infrastructure to translate science into treatments has been missing. LCCI is built to close that gap.
By uniting validated diagnostics, smarter clinical trials, rapid commercialization, and large-scale clinical adoption into a single execution platform, LCCI changes the trajectory of Long COVID from indefinite management to tractable cure development. This is the same systems-level approach that transformed HIV from a fatal disease into a treatable condition – and it is now achievable for Long COVID.
PolyBio is uniquely positioned to lead this effort. With deep scientific leadership, proven clinical trial capacity, established commercialization pathways, and a built-in engine for clinician adoption, LCCI is designed not as a research initiative, but as a delivery mechanism for real-world treatments.
With the right investment at this inflection point, we can shorten the path to effective therapies by years, unlock substantial private-sector follow-on investment, and deliver the first real answers to millions of patients. The science is ready. The infrastructure is clear. LCCI is prepared to execute.
Theory of Change
The Team
The LCCI team includes dozens of experts across many institutions, including UCSF, Harvard, and Mt Sinai.
Amy Proal, PhD., Co-Founder and President, PolyBio Research Foundation, and Scientific Director Cohen Center for Recovery from Complex Chronic Illness at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Proal coordinates and leads LCCI, including mobilizing trials.
Commercialization: Sarah Kalloch, MBA, PolyBio Chief Operating and Innovation Officer, directs commercialization and investment teams.
VIPER: Dr. Steven Deeks, MD, Professor of Medicine in Residence at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and a faculty member in the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Dr. Steven Deeks and team at UCSF lead the core VIPER site.
Education: David Putrino, PhD, Director of the Cohen Center for Recovery from Complex Chronic Illness at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, leads research and education at Mt Sinai’s CoRE Clinic.