Drug cocktail has potency that could tackle variant

Trials show ‘SpiDex’ four times more effective at stopping Covid patients needing intensive care

A DRUG cocktail could help fight the new variant after results show it is four times better at keeping people out of intensive care.

Sir Christopher Edwards, the former vice-chancellor of Newcastle University, has conducted trials showing that a combination of heart failure drug spironolactone and the steroid dexamethasone work far better than dexamethasone alone.

Dexamethasone became the first drug to be licensed for treating Covid after Sir Christopher recommended the treatment to Sir John Bell, who was tasked with finding drugs which could be repurposed for coronavirus.

But he believes more lives could be saved if spironolactone was included, and is calling for wider trials of the “Spidex” regime.

In a randomised controlled trial in Delhi, just 5.4 per cent of hospitalised patients taking “Spidex” were admitted to intensive care compared with 19.6 per cent of those on dexamethasone.

A study in Frontiers in Endocrinology also showed that 40 Covid patients taking the Spidex regime did better on every clinical, biochemical and radiological measure than 40 patients on high dose dexamethasone.

Rather than targeting the virus itself, the treatments work by turning off the devastating impact on the body, so the drug combination should work against the extremely mutated omicron variant which is alarming scientists.

Sir Christopher, an eminent endocrinologist, said: “All the variants use the same taxi to get into the cell, namely the ACE2 receptor. The destruction of the taxi results in a specific series of biochemical consequences which produce the symptoms and complications.

“Spidex treatment blocks the consequences and does not depend on how the virus gets into the taxi. It is thus likely to be effective regardless of mutations in the spike protein of the virus.”

The drugs shut down the reaction which allows the virus to escape from cells. It also stops the deadly clotting and fluid retention in the lungs.

The success of the drugs also give clues about why young and healthy people are largely immune from the impact of Covid.

They have fewer receptors in the lining of the blood vessels, meaning the virus cannot cause problems in the more dangerous parts of the body. Sir Christopher was so convinced the treatment would work that he recommended it to his daughter-in-law when she became seriously ill with Covid and was struggling to breathe. She made a full recovery.

Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University, said: “Dexamethasone is great. There are good theoretical arguments for adding spironolactone. It would be great if there was some good trial data to support it.”