New funding for long Covid research centre raised

The Long COVID Foundation (SLC) has launched a National Research & Innovation Center to investigate long covid in the Netherlands as government money has dried up.

With some €40 million the government provided for research having been spent and no new budget yet allocated, the foundation awarded €500,000 to seven researchers to keep their research going and to “translate scientific discoveries more quickly into diagnostics and targeted treatments for adults and children.”

“SLC wants to prevent years of investment, knowledge and research power from being lost.”

The money is being given to researchers from the hospitals Amsterdam UMC, the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, UMC Utrecht and Erasmus MC. The foundation’s goal is that the centre, operating as an independent foundation and an open national research network, will be a central hub for stimulating and linking research under one national program.

Still no treatment

Calling long covid “one of the great unresolved medical challenges of our time”, the foundation estimates 400,000 people have been affected by it – 100,000 of them seriously. “Yet there are no proven healing treatment, effective diagnostics and targeted therapies yet.”

Long covid sufferers struggle with fatigue, brain fog, loss of concentration, and memory and immune system problems that have severely limited their ability to work and lead normal lives.

Targeted treatments

The foundation says it’s becoming increasingly clear that long covid suffers can be distinguished by groups. “An important task for the centre will be to better distinguish these groups and to investigate which treatments can work in which patients.”

The foundation is also looking into other the post-acute infection syndromes, such as ME/CFS, a chronic illness characterised by an inability to function.

In the future, says SLC, “long-term public and private financing is also needed”.

“The stronger and more structural the research is organized, the more likely it is that scientific discoveries will lead to the diagnostics and targeted treatments that patients have been waiting for so long.”