Traverse City is about to become the country’s epicenter for treating long COVID.

Thanks to a new partnership between a national primary healthcare provider and a northern Michigan-based pioneer in the diagnosis and treatment of long COVID, Traverse City will soon be home to a first-of-its-kind “national long COVID treatment center,” according to a press release. The center, to be based at the Celly Health Medical Group offices in the Bayview Professional Centre, is soft-launching this week with a focus on “providing comprehensive, research-driven care for an estimated 30 million Americans affected by long COVID using technology developed by HealthBio Inc.”

HealthBio is led by Dr. Bruce Patterson, formerly the director of clinical virology and co-director of the AIDS Research Center at Stanford University. Three years ago, thanks in part to an investment from Traverse City’s Boomerang Catapult, Patterson relocated from Silicon Valley to northern Michigan. He brought his work with him – including an ongoing effort to find diagnostics and therapeutics for long COVID.

Defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as “a chronic condition that occurs after SARS-CoV-2 infection and is present for at least 3 months,” long COVID affects approximately one in 10 Americans, according to Traverse City’s Dr. Shawn Cole. Cole leads the TC office for Celly Health, and also serves as national medical director for the organization.

“It’s an extreme challenge for me and my colleagues,” Cole says of long COVID. “It’s things like brain fatigue or memory problems, breathlessness, general fatigue, joint pains and muscle aches, a cough that just never went away. The estimate is that 20-30 million Americans are walking around with this right now, and 400 million people worldwide.”

Cole and Patterson met because their offices happened be in the same building. Cole was intrigued by Patterson’s company and its groundbreaking work around long COVID. The two hit it off, and the plan for a TC-based long COVID center was born.

“Bruce is sitting on [United States Secretary of Health and Human Services] Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s board for long COVID, a national consortium with a lot of academic, governmental, and societal experts,” Cole notes. “All those people are really helping the cause, but Dr. Patterson is the one who's actually treating folks. He’s identified in his research several mechanisms that are at play [with long COVID] and ways that we can, through pharmacology, really allow the immune system to shut itself down a bit and get rid of those protein fragments that are stuck in the white blood cells and triggering this vascular response.”

For several years, Patterson and HeathBio have been exploring the use of two existing medications to address long COVID: maraviroc, an FDA-approved prescription medicine for the treatment of HIV; and atorvastatin, FDA-approved for high cholesterol levels. Chatting with The Ticker last year, Patterson explained that these drugs are useful for “removing the blood vessel inflammation, which is leading to the majority of the symptoms” of long COVID.

Last month, speaking as part of a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services long COVID consortium, Patterson said that he and business partner, Dr. Ram Yogendra, had already used the maraviroc/atorvastatin drug combination to treat 12,000 patients with long COVID. Those treatments have occurred via a telemedicine program called the chronic inflammation center, which also treats Lyme disease. The partnership with Celly Health and the launch of a center in Traverse City are the next steps.

“Some of the criticism that came out of what we were doing with the chronic inflammation center is that a lot of patients wanted a physical place to go to be seen by a doctor,” Patterson explains. “They also wanted more general practice and primary care activities to be available, along with what we were doing for long COVID. Patients would come in with other conditions, and we’d have to defer to their primary care physicians.”

Because Patterson and Yogendra are not licensed in all 50 states, they also had to rely on patients’ primary care physicians to write prescriptions for the drug combination. That provided tricky, as the medications – while approved for other uses – have not yet gone through FDA trials for long COVID.

The partnership with Celly Health, Patterson says, will eliminate those challenges. Celly can offer full-service primary care, including for “all other maladies not related to chronic inflammation,” and patients wishing for an in-person experience can make the trek to Traverse City. And Celly Health is operational in all 50 states.

While Cole expects some patients will flock to Traverse City for treatment, he says locals needn’t fret about the area suddenly being inundated with millions of medical tourists. Celly Health is already eyeing two additional locations for similar centers. Cole also says the treatment path HealthBio has devised – typically a 6-12-week regimen of medication, with “episodic” doctor’s appointments along the way – lends itself well to telehealth.

Patterson is hopeful the new center will be a proving ground for long COVID treatment – particularly for the federal government. While HealthBio got the green light last year to start its FDA trials, Patterson says the process has been stalled.

“We've made the drug and we've enlisted our trial sites,” Patterson says. “What we're really looking for from the government is ongoing funding. We’ve spent the better part of the last 18 months raising money to fund the entire trial, and I think we've done a pretty good job of it. But we still need more money.”

The good news? Among the 12,000 patients Patterson treated are two U.S. Senators and two members of the U.S. House of Representatives, all of whom Patterson says are “pushing the National Institutes of Health to get the funding that we need to complete this trial.”

FDA approval could have numerous benefits for the treatment method, from acceptance within the broader medical community to health insurance reimbursements for patients.

Pictured: Bruce Patterson (second from the right) participates in a long COVID roundtable with U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy and a group of other long COVID "innovators and researchers." The full roundtable can be viewed here.