A $1.35 million initiative will put leading diagnostic approaches head-to-head to determine which tests best detect viral persistence and other biological drivers of the condition.
A nonprofit research organization has launched a large-scale program to validate diagnostic tests for long COVID, targeting what scientists describe as one of the most significant barriers to effective treatment: the absence of standardized, clinically usable diagnostics.
PolyBio Research Foundation announced the launch of VIPER (Viral Immunopathogenesis and Persistence Repeat Donor Cohort) on March 24, deploying an initial $1.35 million to the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) to initiate the effort. The program is designed to conduct head-to-head evaluations of leading diagnostic approaches to determine which tests most accurately detect SARS-CoV-2 persistence and other core disease mechanisms in long COVID patients.
VIPER is the first phase of PolyBio’s Long COVID Cure Initiative, a four-step program intended to move biological discoveries into real-world clinical use.
A Bottleneck in the Long COVID Field
Despite scientific progress since the pandemic, many of the most promising diagnostic tests for long COVID exist only as academic research tools — unstandardized, unvalidated, and inaccessible to clinicians, according to PolyBio. The organization says this gap has led to imprecise clinical trials, poor patient stratification, and therapies that fail to match the underlying biology of the disease.
The VIPER program is designed to address this directly by identifying which tests can reliably detect SARS-CoV-2 persistence and other biological drivers of long COVID. Validated tools, the foundation says, will enable more precise patient stratification, improve clinical trial design, and accelerate the development of targeted therapies.
The initiative builds on the PolyBio-supported long-term Impact of Infection with Novel Coronavirus (LIINC) Study at UCSF and draws on the same team’s earlier work developing diagnostic tests for HIV—an area where a single validated test fundamentally changed how the disease was managed.
“Having witnessed how a single test can transform a complex disease like HIV, I am fully committed to doing my part to develop tests for long COVID,” says Steven Deeks, MD, professor of medicine at UCSF and a senior investigator in both LIINC and VIPER, in a release. “Validated diagnostics will allow us to run smarter, more targeted trials — and ultimately deliver effective treatments to patients faster.”
Donor Coalition Backs Initiative
Funding for the initial phase was provided by a donor coalition that includes the Pagliuca family and Greg and Mindy White, both of whom have family members personally affected by long COVID.
“Long COVID represents one of the most urgent unmet medical challenges of our time,” says Steve Pagliuca, founder and CEO of PagsGroup, in a release. “Scientific insights are advancing, but they are not yet reaching patients. The Long COVID Cure Initiative is changing that by systematically accelerating the path from discovery to real-world treatments.”
Greg White, a healthcare philanthropist and co-donor, emphasized the need for coordinated infrastructure. “The VIPER program builds the diagnostic foundation required to translate discovery into care, enabling smarter clinical trials and a coordinated path to treatments that actually match the biology of the disease,” he says in a release. “This is the kind of integrated infrastructure needed to move an entire long COVID field forward.”
Additional funding announcements for subsequent phases of the Long COVID Cure Initiative are expected.
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