Watch: 'The End of the Antibiotic Era': How COVID-19 Has Changed the Landscape for Health Tech

The spread of the novel coronavirus has sped the adoption of telemedicine in the United States, eliminating barriers like insurance reimbursements. It's also shone a light on the need for faster vaccines and a need for greater investment in public health, experts said on a dot.LA virtual panel Tuesday that looked at how investors are responding to COVID-19.

A move to telemedicine "was a long time coming," said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "A lot of doctors and institutions weren't comfortable with that" but now those concerns have been "blown out of the water." Since the pandemic erupted, two-thirds of UCLA medical visits have been done using telehealth.

Klauser is also a medical director at San Dimas, Calif-based Korva Labs, which has worked with Curative Inc. over the last 18 days to test Los Angeles County first responders and support drive-thrus. He said the partnership has resulted in testing capacity moving from zero to 5,000 daily since the start.

That partnership was helped along by Llewellyn Cox, a general partner at MarsBio, a biotech and deep-tech venture capital firm that invests in pre-seed and seed stage companies. Cox introduced the folks at Curative to Korva. Cox, who has cystic fibrosis, has kept an eye on the novel coronavirus from its earlier days. He convened a task force in the first week of March to try to address COVID-19 response issues like supply chain and access to testing kits.

Cox has since pivoted to looking at companies to help address the second and third wave of issues and technology to prevent another COVID-19 from happening.

Strategy Session: Venture on the Front Line of COVID-19 www.youtube.com

The novel coronavirus has led to a boom in business for companies in the healthcare world. At Wavemaker Three-Sixty Health, a seed-stage healthcare-focused venture capital fund, 27 of its 29 companies in the portfolio are actually "better off" financially due to COVID-19, said Jay Goss, a general partner at the firm.

"We're being pulled to move faster even to the point of accelerating the timeline in the next fund, instead of slowing down," Goss said. "The world is more aware of the need for healthcare, it's always been there, but now more people are paying attention to it and less attention to the need for electric scooters, or other things."

Of the remaining two portfolio companies that have been impacted, one is a clinical trials-related company that has had to hit the pause button on their work to focus on COVID-19.

Prior to COVID-19, vaccines were not a business-savvy area of investment and were very hard to fund, but "that value metric has been turned upside down," Cox said. He said the long production cycles for something like the development of a vaccine — the flu vaccine takes nine months — is an area that could use improvement even now.

"This is a preview of the end of the antibiotic era, what a world without rapidly cheap, accessible (drugs) to fight off infection looks like," Cox said.

Other areas that have become of greater interest are food, agriculture and manufacturing, Cox said.

COVID-19 has also brought to light the lack of investment in public health — already evident from medical staffing shortages, the lack of affordable education, and the need for more on-the-ground community health efforts, the experts said.

Klausner noted that Italy didn't have a strong primary or middle healthcare system, so anybody with COVID-19 was hospitalized because they had built up the end-of-the-road investment in health services.

States have graduated medical students months early to get them to hospitals that need them. In the past few years, there has been some donors who have helped make medical education for doctors free, but those are stopgaps, Klausner said.

"We need to invest and understand that medical, nursing lab technicians, schools are not just training for those individuals (to) benefit by having a job, but also as part of our societal investment to have the type of people we need at a large enough level and large enough skillset to take care of us," Klausner said. "Our population is only aging and our needs are only increasing. We need investment in things like a public health corps."

Klausner served early in his career as an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer at the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, a sort of CIA for public health. The program, he said, has been funded at 50 people since 1951 and no one knows it exists.

"As a society, we've allowed public health training and infrastructure to erode," Klausner said.

Goss said that the ability to address a surge in need should be fluid and those who are trained should somehow be able to be moved when that need is apparent, perhaps using a technological advancement similar to the system apps like Uber use to move needed rides from one area to another in real time.

Klausner added a few more predictions, the home is going to be "ascendant" and people will want to improve their homes and make them more comfortable for daily living, working, learning and exercise.

In terms of home health, "people generally prefer to be taken care of in their home, from physical therapy to your last days on Earth," Goss said. "Telemedicine has been helped and advanced more in the last six weeks than in the 144 years (since) we got the thing called a telephone."

About the Participants:

Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, MD, MPH, is a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases in the David Geffen School of Medicine.

Jay Goss is General Partner at Wavemaker Three-Sixty Health

Llewellyn Cox is a general partner at MarsBio

Rachel Uranga, is a reporter at dot.LA.