The PolyBio Research Foundation recently announced new initiatives and centered biomarkers during their latest virtual conference
Last week, leading researchers presented updates on Long COVID and related diseases at the PolyBio 2026 Spring Symposium.
The virtual event has occurred biannually since fall 2023 and has become a popular forum for rapidfire presentations on emerging research topics in infection-associated chronic conditions (IACCs). This spring’s symposium featured 30 presentations from dozens of researchers over the course of six hours. Past symposiums have included early results from clinical trials, in-depth looks at viral persistence and tissue-based research, and presentations on innovative mouse model studies.
In her opening remarks and presentation, PolyBio Research Foundation president Amy Proal encouraged attendees to pay attention to the “central idea” that researchers are finding the strongest signals for Long COVID and other IACCs in tissue samples. “Many of us in the Long COVID space are starting to look at Long COVID as a largely tissue-based disease,” she said, explaining that researchers have identified major dysfunction in many tissues throughout the body.
Proal said that Long COVID being a primarily tissue-based condition “is one of the reasons why patients are most misunderstood when they go to a doctor,” noting that many standard blood tests have not found abnormalities in people with the disease. “That can lead to dismissal or gaslighting or things that are very problematic.”
Many presentations in the symposium focused on developing and validating biomarkers for the disease, which may be used in clinical trials that are more tailored to subgroups within Long COVID. PolyBio is supporting new infrastructure for clinical trials with its Long COVID Cure Initiative (LCCI); this initiative aims to deliver treatments to people with Long COVID through diagnostic tests, clinical trials, and accessible therapies. It includes the Viral Immunopathogenesis and Persistence Repeat Donor Cohort (VIPER) program, which aims to find a biomarker for Long COVID based on the success of a similar program for HIV.
Other presentations shared case studies of potential treatments for Long COVID and updates on in-depth observational studies for myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), as well as platforms to capture Lyme pathogens. Here are our key takeaways from the symposium.
A focus on diagnostic and biomarker research
“We need diagnostic tests right now in Long COVID and related infection-associated chronic conditions,” Proal emphasized in her opening presentation. To achieve this goal, PolyBio has prioritized a new diagnostics program called VIPER, which aims to validate a test for Long COVID. Proal said the $8 million program is now funded and is “fully underway” out of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
VIPER is led by Proal and UCSF researchers Michael Peluso, Steven Deeks, and Timothy Henrich. The study will include a new cohort of 150 people, with and without Long COVID, who will contribute to a “curated” biobank of blood, saliva, stool, and tissue samples. Researchers are also using preexisting biobank samples from UCSF’s Long-term Impact of Infection with Novel Coronavirus (LIINC) study.
In his presentation, Peluso explained that VIPER aims to address a long-standing challenge in Long COVID research: that the many labs that have developed potential biomarkers and tests tend to work in silos. The field has “no real consensus on how these different measurements perform relative to each other,” he said.
To address that challenge, VIPER will test several different biomarkers across the same cohort, directly comparing their performance. The program aims to validate at least one biomarker, evaluate its predictability over time, and finally, test the impact of new treatments with that biomarker. For instance, does it change in response to interventions, or correlate with symptom improvement?
“We’re really treating this like a clinical trial, even though it is an observational study,” Peluso said. “That’s the level of rigor and intensity that we’re trying to bring to this.” For example, testing labs will be blinded as to which samples correspond to people with Long COVID versus controls. The study will include a wide variety of tissue samples, including gut biopsies, building on LIINC’s prior work studying how Long COVID impacts every part of the body.
The VIPER team has started screening participants for the new study cohort, Peluso said, and plans to identify an initial round of labs with biomarker candidates this summer. Those labs will begin to receive samples in the fall.
We’re really treating this like a clinical trial, even though it is an observational study. That’s the level of rigor and intensity that we’re trying to bring to this.
Michael Peluso, UCSF, about the VIPER program
Those labs may include other research groups supported by PolyBio. The symposium featured several talks about biomarker candidates:
- Alesandra Luchini from George Mason University is developing a potential biomarker for post-treatment Lyme disease. Her approach focuses on extracellular vesicles, particles that cells use to communicate with each other, in urine samples. Her team has identified specific proteins that appear in people infected with species of Borrelia bacteria, which cause Lyme. She plans to test this potential biomarker in people with Long COVID to look for potential intersections of Long COVID and post-treatment Lyme disease.
- Eduardo Reategui’s lab at Ohio State University has developed a biomarker candidate for SARS-CoV-2 persistence, called BARA. Like Luchini, his approach identifies evidence of infection in extracellular vesicles. In results so far, Reategui said that this assay is highly accurate compared to PCR and blood tests for acute COVID-19; his team is now testing it in more samples from people with Long COVID.
- Another SARS-CoV-2 persistence candidate comes from E. John Wherry’s lab at the University of Pennsylvania, which has been studying T cells, a type of immune system cell that can develop the capacity to recognize a specific pathogen. Postdoc researcher Mark Painter presented on the lab’s progress tracking T cells that recognize SARS-CoV-2, as well as Epstein-Barr virus and other herpesviruses that can become reactivated in people with Long COVID.
- Shannon Stott’s lab at Boston University is working on isolating SARS-CoV-2 viral particles from blood samples. Her lab’s research focuses on microfluidics, the field of manipulating tiny amounts of fluids like blood precisely, and has studied a microfluidic chip that she said can detect the coronavirus at high sensitivity. She aims to determine whether the SARS-CoV-2 virus can persist intact in people with Long COVID, addressing a major question in persistence research.
- One more blood test under development uses a technology called Media Enriched with Newly Synthesized Antibodies (MENSA), antibodies that record the immune system’s response to pathogens. Francis Eun Lee from Emory University shared her lab’s progress on a MENSA-based biomarker test. Lee’s team is collaborating with Mount Sinai’s Cohen Center for Recovery from Complex Chronic Illnesses (CoRE) to test samples from their clinical trial of HIV antivirals, studying whether changes in MENSA results correlate to changes in symptoms.
Building infrastructure for smarter and more adaptable clinical trials
VIPER represents the first phase of PolyBio’s Long COVID Cure Initiative (LCCI), the initiative that the foundation announced last year to streamline developing Long COVID diagnostic tests and treatments and bringing them to patients.
Their next phase is the Commercialization Advisory Network, launched this month. At the symposium, Amy Proal described the network as an effort to translate PolyBio’s scientific discoveries on Long COVID into tangible diagnostics and treatments. Proal detailed PolyBio’s efforts to learn from other foundations that have helped bring scientific findings on diseases like cancer to the commercial market.
“We have people in the network with substantial regulatory experience,” Proal said. The network aims to help researchers move tests forward to approvals from the Food and Drug Administration and use in the healthcare system.
The network held its first meeting on May 15 at the Harvard Innovation Labs in Boston. LCCI has two more planned phases: a clinical trials network building on the biomarkers validated by VIPER, and a medical education program to bring research findings into healthcare practice, led by CoRE at Mount Sinai.
“It’s important to emphasize that the Long COVID Cure Initiative is not a one-off program that ends with Long COVID or the SARS-CoV-2 virus,” Proal said. She added that PolyBio is already starting to adapt the model for other IACCs, including chronic Lyme, ME, and other conditions tied to Epstein-Barr virus, like Multiple Sclerosis (MS).
The symposium itself also featured presentations on other relevant chronic diseases, including:
- UCSF’s Chronic Infections and Inflammation in ME/CFS (CHIIME), a new observational study, brings strategies from the university’s innovative LIINC program to examine people who developed ME before 2020. CHIIME was inspired by research finding potential enterovirus persistence in some people with ME, explained Michael Peluso, who is leading the program. The team has started screening participants, and is working to increase their bandwidth as they have been “quite overwhelmed” with interest from the ME community, Peluso said.
- Beverly Peng from the J. Craig Venter Institute shared research on endometriosis, a chronic condition in which reproductive tissue grows in the wrong location and causes significant pain. Peng is conducting in-depth bioinformatics analysis of this tissue, aiming to better understand different types of cells that appear in endometriosis. While endometriosis is not commonly known as an IACC, research has suggested there may be some overlap between it and Long COVID, as well as other infections.
It’s important to emphasize that the Long COVID Cure Initiative is not a one-off program that ends with Long COVID or the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Amy Proal, PolyBio
Finding some early success with treatments, but more research needed
Along with research into diagnostic tests and underlying biology of Long COVID, the symposium featured some updates on potential treatments.
Notably, Dominique Salmon from Paris Cité University shared results from a small, pilot study of the HIV drug maraviroc and the cardiovascular drug pravastatin, a combination first studied by physician Bruce Patterson. Salmon and her colleagues were inspired to start the study after observing “a striking improvement” in one person who had severe Long COVID gastrointestinal symptoms, she said.
The study included 19 people who had severe gastrointestinal symptoms in Long COVID; all of them tried the combination, with no control group. Salmon and her colleagues found the combination did lead to “rapid and sustained improvement” in these symptoms for 13 of the 19 participants. They also observed reductions in SARS-CoV-2 RNA and spike protein in blood samples from some participants, suggesting the treatments may impact viral persistence.
“Our next step is to plan a multicenter randomized trial that will compare combination therapy versus maraviroc alone versus placebo or no treatment,” Salmon said, adding that her team has a funding application underway.
Two other presentations about potential treatments included:
- David Putrino from CoRE presented results from a small, randomized-controlled feasibility trial of microtesla magnetic therapy, a wearable device that addresses brain inflammation with magnetic fields. He also shared these findings at the recent International ME/CFS Conference in Berlin and in a preprint. The study found the therapy was safe and feasible, and suggested it helped improve cognitive symptoms. Putrino and his colleagues are now moving to a “much larger, multi-site, clinical trial,” he said.
- Marc Elia, chairman of the board at the biotech company Invivyd, described how the company is working toward studying monoclonal antibodies for Long COVID as well as post-COVID vaccination syndrome. Last year, Invivyd launched a study group with leading PolyBio scientists to advance this research. While Elia did not share specific developments toward clinical trials at the symposium, he was enthusiastic about the potential for monoclonal antibodies to address not only Long COVID, but also other chronic diseases that follow infection.
Recordings of the presentations are now available on PolyBio’s website.
Miles W. Griffis and Betsy Ladyzhets contributed reporting.
Editor’s note: The PolyBio Research Foundation, like The Sick Times, has received support from the Balvi and Kanro funds. Our newsroom operates independently of financial supporters.
