An existing antiviral drug, remdesivir, is showing signs of helping to treat this new coronavirus, the World Health Organization has said.
“There is only one drug right now that we think may have real efficacy and that’s remdesivir,” Bruce Aylward, a WHO assistant director-general,
said this week at a press conference in Beijing.
Remdesivir is an experimental drug that was tested in humans to
treat the Ebola virus, though studies found it was ineffective for that.
Developed by American biotech firm
Gilead Sciences, the drug is slated for these trials:
—
The University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha: A clinical trial is
underway there — and the first participant is an American who was evacuated from the
Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in Japan, the US National Institutes of Health said.
Participants will receive 200 milligrams of remdesivir intravenously when they’re enrolled and another 100 while they’re hospitalized for up to 10 days in total. A placebo group will receive a solution that resembles remdesivir but contains only inactive ingredients, the NIH said.
“We will know reasonably soon whether it works. And if it does, we will then have an effective therapy to distribute,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Wednesday.
— Studies elsewhere: About 1,000 coronavirus patients, primarily in Asia, will be part of two randomized studies of remdesivir, starting in March, Gilead Sciences
said Wednesday.
One will be for about 400 patients with severe symptoms. The other will be for about 600 patients with more moderate symptoms. The study will look at the effectiveness of different dosing durations: Patients in both groups will receive the drug for either five or 10 days.
•
HIV drugs: Doctors around the world, including in
Thailand and China, have been trying a combination of HIV and flu drugs.
Results of those studies haven’t been widely reported, but there are a few reasons to explore HIV antiretroviral drugs. Like HIV, coronaviruses are
RNA viruses. And years ago, a combination of HIV drugs and an antiviral drug seemed to help some patients in the 2002-2004 outbreak of SARS, caused by a different coronavirus, according to a study
published in the journal Thorax.
“China learned from prior coronavirus epidemics (
SARS and
MERS) to repurpose antiretroviral and antiviral medications for partial treatment of this newest global health scare,” Dr. Sten Vermund, dean of the Yale School of Public Health,
wrote for CNN last month.
A number of companies around the world say they’ve developed potential vaccines after obtaining genetic information about the virus.
Since this coronavirus emerged in in December in Wuhan, China, these candidates have emerged quickly. By comparison, researchers took about 20 months to start human tests of the vaccine for SARS,
Fauci has written.
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