The funding will fast-track Long COVID diagnostics and treatments

MEDFORD, Mass., April 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — PolyBio Research Foundation today announced a $10 million donation to support the Long COVID Cure Initiative (LCCI), a program designed to deliver treatments to millions of Long COVID patients by translating key academic findings into real-world diagnostic tests, faster and more targeted clinical trials, and accessible, patient-ready therapies.

Funding was provided by the Park-Pagliuca Fund, a philanthropic collaboration between the families of Todd Park and Steve Pagliuca, each of whom have family members impacted by Long COVID.

The Bottleneck: Translation, Not Discovery

Long COVID has left hundreds of millions worldwide with debilitating fatigue, neurological dysfunction, and increased health risks including heart attack and stroke. In the United States alone, the condition is estimated to cost trillions of dollars and has pushed millions of people out of the workforce. 

Over the past five years, PolyBio’s international research consortium and others have identified reproducible biological drivers of Long COVID — including immune dysregulation and viral persistence — that point directly to therapeutic targets.

What’s missing is not insight — it is infrastructure.

“There is a growing disconnect between what science already knows about Long COVID and what patients and clinicians can actually access,” said PolyBio President Dr. Amy Proal. “LCCI is designed to close that gap, systematically and at speed.”

Diagnostics and Targeted Treatments

The Park-Pagliuca fund adds to previous support for VIPER, a first-of-its-kind program focused on validating biomarkers and diagnostic tests that detect and quantify SARS-CoV-2 persistence and other biological drivers of Long COVID.

The funds will also allow the LCCI core team to start building a national, diagnostics-guided, clinical trials network purpose-built for Long COVID. By embedding validated diagnostics into trial design and standardizing trial endpoints, the network will allow trials to enroll faster and generate clearer, decision-ready results. These concrete steps will incentivize greater pharmaceutical investment while accelerating the path to effective treatments.

PolyBio is also working to expand the LCCI model to chronic Lyme disease, ME/CFS, and related conditions. This will support the identification and validation of novel diagnostic platforms to determine which tests can be used to guide more targeted treatments, accelerating therapeutic development across a broader set of diseases.

A Catalytic Matching Funding Model to Accelerate the Next Phases

This $10 million donation also aims to drive rapid expansion of LCCI through matched philanthropy. The Park-Pagliuca Fund is actively engaging donors to match their commitment with an additional $10 million of funds, with the goal of unlocking subsequent phases of the initiative — including extended support of the diagnostics-guided Long COVID clinical trials network, and translation of validated findings into clinical practice via a medical education program.

“This is an opportunity to help close one of the biggest gaps in medicine today,” said Steve Pagliuca, Founder and CEO of PagsGroup. “As someone whose family has been personally affected, I’ve seen firsthand how devastating this condition can be. Long COVID is one of the largest unmet medical challenges of our time, and the science is ready for translation. By combining philanthropic capital with a focused execution strategy, we can help compress a process that would normally take decades into just a few years.”

“The biology of Long COVID is measurable. The missing piece is the infrastructure to validate those signals and translate them into biomarkers, diagnostics, and treatments,” said Todd Park, co-founder of Devoted Health and Athenahealth. “LCCI is built to deliver exactly that.”

To donate to LCCI, go to polybio.org/lcci

About PolyBio Research Foundation
PolyBio Research Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization advancing research on how viral, bacterial, and parasitic infections drive chronic disease and aging. We build collaborative projects that identify, diagnose, and treat root causes of infection-associated chronic illness.

Media contact: Anastasia Hall at info@polybio.org.

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SOURCE PolyBio Research Foundation