COVID-19 UPDATE
During the global coronavirus outbreak, our key priority is to safeguard the health and wellbeing of our employees, patients, healthcare providers, community members, partners and, of course our family members and friends.
We have been concerned since we first learned about the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) and quickly began communicating with our employees about safeguarding their health. Given the dynamism of the disease and the unprecedented challenges posed by this outbreak, we have created an internal Theravance COVID-19 Task Force to provide ongoing guidance to our team.
Our ongoing actions include:
- Increasing and implementing aggressive cleaning protocols at all Theravance sites
- Issuing guidance on how our employees can protect themselves against coronavirus infection – most importantly hand washing and social distancing, no hand shaking or personal contact
- Prohibiting any non-essential visitors at Theravance Biopharma sites
- Strongly encouraging office employees, temps and consultants to work from home to reduce the potential rate of transmission and to minimize any risk for those employees who are needing to come into the office
- Mandating virtual meetings
- Implementing travel restrictions for non-essential business travel worldwide
- Ceasing Field-based customer-facing activities beginning 13 MAR 2020. In the interest of maintaining social distancing and protecting our Field-based employees who are typically in a hospital or clinical care setting, a high-risk area for infection and transmission for disease, as well as doctors and patients.
- Stopping live attendance at medical congresses, advocacy/community events, investor conferences and looking at novel means of participating (e.g. virtually)
From a clinical perspective:
- Enacting mitigation plans to ensure patients in our trials continue to have ongoing drug supply
- Working to find means of reducing patient needs to travel to sites in hopes of avoiding unnecessary exposure while balancing safety monitoring of investigational products
- Continuing to manage our ongoing clinical studies by working closely with regulators, ethics committees and clinical sites around the world to ensure that our clinical trial participants are appropriately supported
- Closely monitoring this evolving situation
The world is wrestling with a challenge of immense scale, and we are focused on helping our employees and communities though this taxing time. Here is a list of credible resources you can refer to for the latest information:
World Health Organization
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Center for Systems Science and Engineering at John Hopkins University
San Mateo County Health
European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control
North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services
The New England Journal of Medicine
We are grateful to authorities and health workers for all they are doing and to our employees for their dedication to the communities we serve. We will continue to be vigilant and ask that you are too.
At Theravance Biopharma, thanks to investments in infrastructure and our team’s ability to find a way, we are maintaining our focus on creating medicines to improve the lives of patients suffering from serious illnesses.
