John Deeks

We would think that this is a reasonable way to behave, to let the test companies make the decision about whether information is published or not.

We all know about publication bias.

We all know about conflicts of interest.

The biomarker companies are the only part of the industry making money at the moment in this pandemic.

There's a lot of money to be made.

We should not put them in a position where they're in charge of letting us know or not know the results of their studies.

It should all be out there for us to understand and see how well things work.

So often in the history of medicine, when things have gone wrong, when we've actually harmed people, we actually reflect on our regulation and see it's lacking.

I'm sure that we're at that point now with biomarker tests.

Well, I think there's so much research going on in getting good tests here that there are teams all around the world doing a lot of work to get the tests sorted and to understand what's happening.

Good testing for infectious diseases often takes decades.

We haven't got good influenza tests until recent years, for example.

So the speed with which industry is focusing on this problem is

is really good and hopefully we'll get some good tests come through from that.

So I think there's a lot of hope that we'll actually make a big difference soon and things are moving fast in this field.

It's important that we keep on top of it, it's important that we keep

to the truth to make sure that the biomarker companies and the evidence is available to us.

And hopefully we can use this whole experience to make long-term benefits to the way in which we run the biomarker testing industry and regulation for years to come.