Like so many companies around the world, TREND Community was caught off guard by the COVID-19 virus. We found ourselves bogged down in problems for which there were no established courses of action. If you hop in a time machine and go back to February of 2020, you’re not going to find any blogs posts titled, “Ten Simple Hacks for Weathering the Economic Devastation of a Global Pandemic.” There was no playbook, no set of instructions, and TREND was left with many choices to make—many of them between bad and worse.
But we are coming back better than ever, and if there was one upside to the temporary scale back, it was the time to think deeply about the future and purpose of the company. The silver lining is that we have decided to vastly increase our efforts in helping the world better understand the issues affecting disease communities.
TREND remains more committed than ever to inspiring research, accelerating the discovery of promising treatments, and making life a little easier for those of us living with rare and underserved diseases by listening to our communities and uniting stakeholders.
As the company begins the second half of 2020, we will be focusing more resources than ever before to the creation of our flagship Community Voice Reports (CVRs). We believe that the more disease groups we work with, the bigger our impact will be.
We know that past setbacks will result in brighter futures. If you are a member of a rare disease community who would like to collaborate with us, or if you know about a treatment in development that needs further research, we want to hear from you.