When Gill Deacon was in the thick of her experience with Long COVID, her symptoms were debilitating. The condition sapped her energy, wreaked havoc on her digestive system, caused excruciating pain in her limbs and caused her to suffer intense headaches.
Long COVID can be difficult to diagnose and even harder to treat as the medical field races to understand this relatively new condition. That’s where clinical researchers like Dr. Kieran Quinn come in.
In partnership with Dr. Angela Cheung, a Clinician Scientist at University Health Network, Dr. Quinn is leading RECLAIM, one of the world’s first clinical trials that aims to discover new treatments for Long COVID. Gill joined the trial, hoping the medication would improve her symptoms, but the results were not what she expected.
While Gill didn’t experience a meaningful improvement in her symptoms, she did find a medical team, led by Dr. Quinn, who encouraged her to continue exploring possible treatment pathways. Dr. Quinn’s curiosity, compassion and openness to hearing about what was and was not working to help Gill manage her symptoms was instrumental in helping her navigate her journey towards recovery.
Eventually, Gill did find a program that helped her make a full recovery, but she knows there is so much more research needed to help others who are still coping with Long COVID and are looking for answers. The cost of clinical trials can run from $10 million to $100 million, and research funding is highly competitive and hard to come by.
That’s why Sinai Health Foundation raises funds to support clinical research. Building the medical knowledge needed to help people like Gill recover starts with the work clinician scientists like Dr. Quinn are doing every day.
Clinical researchers like Dr. Quinn play a unique role within the medical system. They take real-time feedback they receive from patients like Gill to inform what therapeutic pathways they study. The research they conduct is essential for finding safe, effective treatments for complex conditions such as Long COVID, diseases of aging, cardiovascular disease and more.
“When we speak to patients like Gill and learn that a certain treatment may have worked for her, that raises our interest to say, ‘if it works for her, it may work for others.’ But we need to study that properly to prove whether it does or doesn’t, and that’s where the research comes in,” says Dr. Quinn.