Nordic Life Science 1
William A. Haseltine and Barbro Ehnbom, founder o
f the Swedish-American Life Science Summit (SALSS) at SALSS 2017 t is true that we are doing our best to remedy that defect, but it will take time to understand the full subtlety of this virus. To put that in perspective, it is only now, after 35 years of intense research of HIV, that we are beginning to completely understand how that virus interacts with a human cell and the human body in a way that allows us to interfere ever more effectively in its action. Even with all the marvelous tools that we now have, we are in a far more primitive state with our understanding of coronaviruses, despite the havoc they have already caused in two epidemics in this early part of the century. I will point to one area in particular; the coronaviruses play 78 NORDICLIFESCIENCE.ORG havoc with our immune system in ways we have never previously seen. As I mentioned, these are “get it and forget it” viruses. The human body appears to forget that it has been infected. How does that happen? We do not know. The next issue is how can this particular coronavirus cause such massive damage to the human body and not be limited to just the lungs? There were too few cases of SARS or MERS to understand the full ramifications of infections. Many of the symptoms and pathologies we associate with COVID infections were probably extant in MERS and SARS patients. However, there were too few patients to accumulate the knowledge necessary to understand the full range of what was happening. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case with COVID, where we have more than 600,000 people worldwide who have already died from this disease.” NLS PHOTO AUGUST DELLER T