Long COVID Advocacy Opportunity: FDA Announces New Focus on Repurposed Meds!
On May 12, 2026 the FDA put out a call for a renewed focus on repurposed medications. They signaled their willingness to consider treatment data under existing legislation known as the Real World Evidence (RWE) pathway.
Real World Evidence is a legal and regulatory pathway that allows the FDA to make decisions about drug approval based on the real life experiences of patients, rather than relying only on clinical trials.
This pathway can be used to bring answers to patients more urgently. In the past, RWE has been used to expand access to lifesaving medications based on small numbers of case studies, whereas a full placebo-controlled clinical trial wouldn’t have been ethical. It has also been used to expand the eligibility criteria for who can receive a certain medication without waiting for expensive, multi-year clinical trials (source).
In this recent announcement, the FDA signalled that they’re specifically looking to repurpose medications for these conditions - particularly for drugs which don’t currently have much commercial interest.
This is a perfect opportunity for those in the Long COVID Community to make ourselves heard!
While it thankfully would be inaccurate to say there is no commercial interest in LC, we all know that pharmaceutical investment has been slow, as the companies say they are waiting for more established biomarkers before running trials.
We believe, as many researchers do, that there are existing medications currently sitting unused on shelves right now that could be treating, or even curing people, as in our founder Rohan’s personal experience.
We are interested in repurposed treatments such as:
- Antivirals: Paxlovid, molnupiravir, anti-EBV medications, ensitrelvir (which is under review for possible approval as post-exposure prophylaxis)
- Monoclonal antibodies - Evusheld is what cured Rohan, see also this case study of recoveries from Regen-Cov, we are also gathering data from patients in our Patient Registry who’ve seen improvements on Pemgarda and Sipavibart
- IVIG
- Immunomodulators to increase antiviral immune response - PD-1 inhibitors are an existing treatment for cancer and are about to be studied for Long COVID in an upcoming clinical trial.
The FDA has requested public comment here. You can share your thoughts and upload any supporting documentation. The deadline to comment is June 11, 2026.
Long COVID Labs will be submitting a comment ourselves, along with anonymized data from the first round of patients who shared their experiences in our Patient Registry! (We’ll be sharing all of that data open-source with the community - stay tuned for that as well!).
For now we wanted to get the word out. Anyone who wants the FDA to seriously consider repurposed medications for Long COVID, please do make your voice heard!