Doctors tired of waiting for government start own Long Covid research

Tired of waiting for subsidies from the Dutch government, over 40 doctors and scientists from five academic centers will jointly research the cause of Long Covid with private funding. They have put together four research groups, which will start working next month, financed by the Long Covid Foundation, the Volkskrant reports.

The foundation was established last year and has already raised almost 1.5 million euros from donations to use for research into Long Covid. Dutch Long Covid patients currently have nowhere to turn for an expert opinion - the last Long Covid, also sometimes called post-Covid syndrome, outpatient clinics closed six months ago due to a lack of funding. The Long Covid Foundation and participating doctors and scientists have now decided to take matters into their own hands.

“There is a lot of enthusiasm among scientists for biomedical research,” Merel Hellemons, pulmonologist at Erasmus MC and one of the research leaders, told the Volkskrant. “We really wanted to get started, but all this time, we lacked money, and without money, we couldn’t do anything,”

“It is special that all these doctors have put their self-interest aside and started consulting with each other,” said Annelies Bos, co-founder of the foundation. She has been struggling with severe Long Covid symptoms for three years, which forced her to stop working. An estimated 90,000 people in the Netherlands have severe Long Covid.

The researchers will initially focus on finding the cause of Long Covid. “Closing the tap is more successful if you know where the leak is,” Hellemons told the newspaper. International research has so far only produced puzzle pieces. Hellmons doesn’t expect an immediate breakthrough. “But we are happy that we can now finally use our expertise and do not have to wait and see what happens abroad.”

The four research teams will each investigate one of the four most plausible hypotheses about the cause of Long Covid. One team will look at possible problems with blood clotting and tiny blood vessels to see if Long Covid patients’ blood vessels deviate, resulting in insufficient oxygen reaching the muscle tissue. Other teams will investigate whether Long Covid is an autoimmune disease in which the body makes antibodies against itself, what the role is of inflammation in the nervous system, and whether remaining virus particles disrupt the immune system.

The University Medical Centers in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Leiden, Utrecht, and Maastricht are participating in the research. The researchers include doctors and scientists, including 13 professors. Their work should lay the foundation for more extensive studies that can be conducted next year with government subsidies promised by the Ministry of Public Health.