“I Take That as a Threat”: Big Pharma Is Meddling in the Race for a COVID-19 Treatment

A Yale researcher poised to start a crucial clinical trial received an ominous email from a pharmaceutical company. “There is undoubtedly a financial motivation,” he said—and there could be millions on the line.

A look into how the system works.

In New Haven, meanwhile, Dr. Joseph Vinetz, an infectious disease doctor at Yale School of Medicine, is seeking to launch a clinical study of the drug camostat mesylate, a generic medication approved in Japan to treat chronic pancreatitis that he hopes can be approved and marketed to treat COVID-19. If the trial succeeds, he said, this could be ”a total game changer.” But the process is proving fraught. Within hours of registering his trial on a National Institutes of Health website on April 20, he received an email from a large U.S. pharmaceutical company. “They are trying to take my project and engulf it for their proprietary [financial] gain,” Vinetz told me. “I take that email as a threat.”

“I Take That as a Threat”: Big Pharma Is Meddling in the Race for a COVID-19 Treatment