TREND and COVID 19: An Open Letter in Response to the Pandemic

Maria Picone
Maria Picone
Co-Founder/CEO

For the use of screen readers, we have pasted the letter in plain text below.

Like most businesses around the world, TREND has been impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak. We are posting this open letter as a way to let everyone know where we stand today, and where we plan to go in the future.

As always, TREND seeks to make the voices of those living with rare diseases heard. This has not changed. What has changed is the focus of the healthcare industry on the pandemic. Because TREND operates at the intersection of patient communities, medical research, and pharmaceutical companies, the projects that we have been working on have been slowed to make time for the urgent requirements of COVID-19.

In the wake of this crisis, there is an increased awareness of the importance of anecdotal data because the clinical data that researchers and regulators are used to having do not exist. In response to this need, we have shifted our focus

to scaling our technology in order to handle the increased volume of data and more frequent analysis that addressing COVID-19 requires. We are optimistic about the path forward.

This pandemic is giving the world an idea of what it is like to have a rare and poorly understood disease. The amount of effort that goes into finding and testing treatments is now something we can all relate to. There isn’t time for the clinical trial process we have used for the past 50 years.

TREND has always been a data company, and with the unprecedented amount of collaboration occurring around the world, coupled with the regulatory creativity being applied to product pipelines, we are perfectly positioned to help in the current fight. When we emerge from the disruption of this pandemic, the value of the work we do will be better understood, our systems will be stronger, and we will be able to make an even greater contribution to our rare disease communities.