Since early in the COVID-19 pandemic, FasterCures has been committed to capturing lessons learned and opportunities to improve the biomedical research ecosystem. Our first white paper, Lessons Learned From COVID-19: Are There Silver Linings for Biomedical Innovation?, offered recommendations for policymakers and other leaders to apply those pandemic-era lessons and innovations to other health conditions. FasterCures also produced an Implementation Roadmap focused on a subset of those recommendations and continues to work directly on some of the policy ideas from the white paper.

With the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency in May 2023, we looked back at all the recommendations in the original white paper and developed a post-pandemic scorecard to keep these issues front and center with the biomedical innovation ecosystem, highlighting positive progress and areas requiring additional focus and resources across five broad areas:

1. research collaboration,

2. acceleration of product development,

3. clinical trial design and execution,

4. collection and use of real-world data and evidence, and

5. addressing racial and ethnic disparities in health care and research.

Although urgent unmet health needs and significant impediments to collaboration and acceleration remain, the biomedical innovation ecosystem seems to have taken to heart some of the lessons learned in the crucible of COVID-19 and is striving to institutionalize them.