Of course, we all hope that the surge is not coming in anywhere between five and 10 years. We suspect that with early diagnosis of cognitive impairments already observed.... There are a number of clinical studies that have looked at neurological consequences, particularly through neuroimaging. Some of these things can be diagnosed early.
One of the interesting concepts that's emerged in this process is.... It's always been thought that there's a linkage between infectious diseases and, in many cases, viruses. One of the witnesses described HIV. HIV is very unfortunate and leads to a lot of neurodegenerative diseases. We saw that very early on in the absence of treatment. When treatments were available, these different complications that led to many neurodegenerative diseases and cognitive impairments reduced dramatically. Now, in HIV, this is a very uncommon secondary infection and secondary disease.
One of the points with this is to try to identify therapeutics early on with things that we never had in the early days, for example, with HIV infections. There has been an explosion in pharma with anti-inflammatories and immunomodulatory drugs, and even antivirals. You can envision, even though the antivirals that exist today don't necessarily have a great impact in shortening the duration of disease—the COVID infection, that is—they could be instrumental in reducing the inflammatory responses that are likely the triggers for long-term COVID in general, but, in particular, in reducing early-onset dementia and the diseases I described earlier.
We have the opportunity now to screen for these drugs using very sophisticated animal models that have never been available before, specifically in cognitive early-onset...early diagnoses of cognitive decline and impairment. As a consequence, we can start looking at the drugs that are already available to us and try to identify ones that will be effective. Those particular drugs that are most often Health Canada-approved could then be parlayed into clinic trials pretty rapidly, because we are all developing these cohorts of long-term COVID to try to stave off what we see as the coming pandemic.
It's the way we envision this approach. As we screen for these current drugs that we have available to us, we try to identify the pathways leading there and develop much more targeted therapies that can be applied later with, maybe, reduced side effects, for example.
That's the way the academic community that studies this area is envisioning it. Fortunately, we have the tools and investments that were made early on. This is a pretty long-term, heavy financial commitment, but it is one that could save us billions in the future and preserve our health care system.
I hope that answers the question.