Treatment trials: UCSF researchers are testing a mixture of two promising COVID-19 treatments.

Researchers at UCSF have begun testing a mixture of two of the most promising treatments for COVID19 in hopes that the concoction will be the “golden ticket” everyone is looking for to neutralize the coronavirus and relieve world anxiety.

The Bay Area doctors participating in the global study, which is sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, treated their first patient last week with a combination of remdesivir, an antiviral drug developed to treat Ebola, and interferon, an antiinflammatory used for people with multiple sclerosis.

The hope is that, together, the two drugs will cut the length and severity of sickness and reduce the number of deaths caused by SARSCoV2, the specific coronavirus that causes COVID19.

“We are looking for the golden ticket,” said Peter ChinHong, a professor of medicine and infectious diseases at UCSF, who is on the study team. “The gold medalist will be a combination of drugs that will get you to the sweet spot.”

It is the third phase of NIHsponsored drug trials looking for a medicinal cocktail, like the combination of treatments HIVAIDS patients now use to control infection. Researchers hope

to develop an effective drug cocktail for COVID19 by the end of the year.

Remdesivir, which is made by Gilead Sciences of Foster City, interferes with the process through which the coronavirus replicates itself. A large study led by the federal government generated excitement in late April when hospitalized patients who received remdesivir intravenously recovered faster than those who received a placebo.

Doctors have been using remdesivir to treat severely ill patients ever since. The problem is that there is conflicting evidence on whether remdesivir reduces the number of deaths, so “it’s not a gold medalist in my Olympics of drugs,” ChinHong said. “It’s a silver medalist.”

That is where beta interferon comes in, he said. A recent study in the United Kingdom showed hospitalized people who inhaled interferon like an asthma medication recovered faster. He said the preliminary study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, showed an 80% decrease in both fatalities and the number of patients on breathing tubes compared with people on a placebo.

Interferon has also reportedly worked in laboratory studies on SARS, a coronavirus identified in 2003 in China, and MERS, discovered in Saudi Arabia in 2012. Those viral respiratory illnesses caused similar symptoms to those in people infected by SARSCoV2.

An added benefit, ChinHong said, is that interferon is readily available, relatively cheap and can be given to patients at home.

“That’s why interferon is the darling right now,” he said.

The plan is to enroll patients at UCSF and some 100 other places around the world. The 1,000 or so patients in the study will all be given a remdesivir infusion. Half will also be injected with interferon, while the other half will get a placebo. The researchers will then study how the patients in each group react over time.

The combination is necessary, ChinHong said, because remdesivir is designed to attack the virus, while interferon reduces inflammation. The inflammatory response, known as a cytokine storm, is a serious problem among COVID19 patients whose immune systems overreact to the disease, worsening infections in the lungs and other organs.

If the two drugs work well together, researchers think they could use it as an outpatient treatment that might prevent hospitalizations. Gilead Sciences is studying a nebulized formula of remdesivir that could be inhaled at home.

“It would mean I have something I can give patients that would decrease hospitalizations, decrease deaths and decrease the need for a breathing tube,” ChinHong said. “All those things would make me feel excited.”

Art Reingold, a professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley and unaffiliated with the study, cautioned against getting one’s hopes up too high.

“It will be nice if it works,” Reingold said. “But many things don’t.”

Robert Siegel, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford University also unaffiliated with the study, said successful therapies take a long time to develop.

“The public is ever hopeful that there will be a home run drug or vaccine that will put an end to the pandemic,” he said. “Based on what we know, this combination is more likely to be an incremental improvement than the hopedfor dream therapeutic — more like a base hit than a home run.”

The two drugs aren’t the only ones that have shown promise. The steroid dexamethasone significantly reduced fatalities in seriously ill COVID19 patients during a recent drug trial conducted by the University of Oxford. That finding marked the first time any coronavirus treatment has proven to prevent deaths.

ChinHong said remdesivir, dexamethasone, and other treatments and techniques developed during the pandemic have already reduced deaths in hospitals around the country, offering hope and an incentive to intensify the search for more effective treatments.