Race for COVID drugs dogged by false promises, lack of co-ordination

More than a year after COVID-19 emerged, few therapies exist and many that do are expensive, cumbersome and unproven, say experts who suggest disjointed data, funding and communication are derailing efforts to tamp down disease.

While warp speed efforts to develop vaccines have produced several promising options in mere months, there’s been comparatively little push for treatment tools to cut severe cases and deaths that are crippling health-care systems, says COVID-19 researcher Dr. Jordan Feld, a liver specialist at UHN’s Toronto Centre for Liver Disease.

The urgency for effective drugs has only become more intense amid Canada’s vaccine deployment debacle and the rise of more infectious variants, adds Feld, whose research into a promising antiviral treatment was recently published in Lancet Respiratory Medicine.

“It would have been nice to have seen a little more coordinated effort to try to develop antiviral therapies early on, and that’s probably hampered all of our efforts at developing therapeutics,” says Feld, calling for more national and global co-ordination of clinical studies and data sharing.

Feld’s research centres on a protein that can activate cellular pathways to kill invading viruses. Early data on injecting the drug, called peginterferon-lambda, into COVID patients found it significantly sped recovery for patients enrolled in a small Phase 2 clinical trial.

The 30 participants who received the experimental drug were four times more likely to clear the infection within a week than those in the placebo group.

Slightly different studies on peginterferon-lambda include efforts at the University of Toronto, New York’s Mount Sinai medical school, and Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Stanford universities, says Feld.

But all were planned independently when a shared effort could have allowed scientists to collaborate on trial design and divide work based on expertise and local situations, he says. He envisions an approach similar to the Manhattan Project, which was a Second World Warera effort to develop an atomic weapon.

“This is a national emergency, we need to develop the bomb - in this case we need to develop the antiviral bomb or the vaccine bomb,” he says.

Most clinicians have a relatively scant arsenal to fight COVID-19, agrees Hamilton infectious disease physician Zain Chagla.

“The fact that we have millions and millions of patients across the world and our clinical trial data is still only coming out with thousands of patients’ experience is an absolute shame,” says Chagla, an associate professor of medicine at McMaster University.

“We should have had more patients enrolled in clinical trials to robustly answer these questions of what therapies worked or didn’t work.”

Dexamethasone, given to hospitalized patients who need help breathing, has been among the most significant therapies to tackle COVID-19 in a field littered with false promises.

Feld points to hydroxychloroquine as the poster child of misguided, politically motivated treatment bids, while more recently, unproven hype has surrounded the anti-parasitic drug Ivermectin. Premature promotion does all scientific research a disservice, he says.

“That probably actually hinders studies from being done, because when people feel like it’s good or bad - and especially if that changes with their political leanings — that may really affect the way you get people enrolling in a trial or not enrolling in a trial,” says Feld.

On top of that, Chagla says it’s been hard to keep some clinicians from giving unproven therapies to suffering patients with no other options.

“That was the issue in the beginning, for sure - people felt uncomfortable having a patient on a ventilator without giving them hydroxychloroquine or giving them some other drug to make it feel like they’re doing something based on a few case reports and a few theories.”

Just last week, the Quebec government cautioned clinicians against embracing colchicine as a COVID-19 therapy after the Montreal Heart Institute touted the common gout medication as “a major scientific discovery.”